Jill’s lips quivered ominously again, and half unconsciously as it were she fingered one of the broken pieces in lingering regret.
“It had associations,” she said simply.
He stooped forward so that he could see her face, and his hand sought hers where it rested upon the table, and with a kindly pressure imprisoned it while he spoke.
“Can’t you form associations round this one too?” he asked.
For a moment there was silence. Then she looked back at him and smiled faintly.
“I have commenced doing so already,” she answered, and, quietly withdrawing her hand, rose and stood back a little the better to admire his purchase.
“It was dreadfully extravagant of you to buy a thing like that just for an art school model,” she exclaimed. “It ought to be in some drawing-room instead of here.”
“It looks very well where it is,” he answered coolly. “But I think I’ll give over trying to draw it for a time; I can’t catch that sadly contemplative, sweetly scornful expression at all; I make a sneer of it which is diabolical. Don’t insist, please; because it makes me nervous just to look at her.”
That was the beginning of things—at any rate the perceptible commencement; though it might have begun with the flowers as Isobel had insinuated. Never a word did St. John utter that Jill could possibly have turned or twisted into a betrayal of the growing regard which she felt in her heart he entertained for her, and never a sign did Jill make that she understood, or in any way reciprocated his unspoken liking. She knew that he loved her by instinct, and the knowledge made her glad, so that her life was no longer lonely, nor the occasional privations, the incessant work, the petty, carking, almost daily worries so hard to bear. Life was one long pleasant day-dream; though sometimes Miss Bolton “biked” through the dreaming, and then it became a night-mare, and Jill was consumed with a fierce burning jealousy that lasted until a new-born, audacious, delicious conceit—her woman’s intuition—assured her that poor and insignificant though she was St. John was far more fond of her than he would ever be of his pretty, elegant, and wealthy cousin.