He was not though, and he knew it. He considered her vexation altogether disproportionate, and absurd to a degree verging on affectation. Had the damage been irreparable he could have understood her loss of self-control; but it was only a plaster cast which she must assuredly know that he would replace. Being a man he did not take sentiment into consideration at all, but merely thought her ill-tempered and ungovernable.
“How dare you equal your sorrow to mine?” Jill demanded fiercely. “You can’t know how I feel. I don’t believe you care.”
Her lip trembled and she turned quickly away. Never had she looked so forlorn, so little, so shabby, he thought, as at that moment, and perhaps never in his life before had he felt so uncomfortable—such a brute. Vacating his position of safety he approached until he was close behind her where she stood with her back to the débris, and he saw that her hands were picking nervously at the paint-soiled apron.
“Don’t,” he said, and his voice sounded strangely unlike his usual tones. “You make me feel such a beast. You know that I care—you must know it. I would rather anything had happened than have vexed you like this.”
“It doesn’t matter,” answered Jill a little unsteadily, and then one of the two big tears which had been welling slowly in her eyes fell with a splash upon the floor, and he started as though she had struck him a second time.
“Don’t,” he entreated again. And then without waiting for more he took his hat and slipped quietly out of the studio. Jill scarcely noticed his departure, did not even speculate as to his object in thus unceremoniously leaving, nor wonder whether he was likely to return or not. She was rather relieved at finding herself alone, and able to give vent to the emotion she could no longer repress. Sitting down at the table in the seat which St. John had so suddenly vacated she laid her head upon his drawing-board and wept all over the paper. The outburst, which was purely neurotic,—such outbursts usually are—had been gathering for days past, and had culminated with the fall of Clytie—the breaking of the bust which her father had so loved. Alas! for the sweet, sad, absurd associations which cling about the things that the dead have touched.
St. John was not away very long; he had been to a shop that he knew of quite handy, and had driven there and back thanks to the stupid cabs that Miss Bolton found so inconvenient. He had bought another bust of Clytie, an altogether superior article in Parian marble which he carried back to the studio in triumph quite expecting to see Jill’s grief vanish at sight of it, and tears give place to smiles. He found her still seated at the table; she was not crying any longer; but the traces of recent emotion were sufficiently apparent for him to detect at a glance. The sight sobered him instantly, and he approached with less confidence in the efficiency of his purchase than had possessed him when out of her presence.
“It’s all right,” he exclaimed, speaking as cheerfully as he could, and placing the new Clytie on the table among the ruins of her predecessor, “I managed to get another. I hope you’ll like it as well as the one I broke. It was confoundedly clumsy of me. But you aren’t angry with me still?”
“No,” answered Jill, raising her head to view the Clytie as he drew off the paper wrapping for her to see. “Oh!” she cried, “it is far too good; mine was only plaster.”
“Was it?” he said slowly. “And yet, I fancy, you preferred it infinitely to this one.”