He changed from angry crimson to dead white, and gazed at her in hurt displeasure.
“You mean that?” he asked.
“Certainly,” she answered with vindictive and unnecessary emphasis, “I am not in the habit of prevaricating.”
“Very well,” he said in a tone of forced calm which contrasted ill with the pained expression of his face, “I believe you. And under the circumstances am quite of your opinion that further acquaintance had better cease. It was a mistake my coming at all both for you and for me. Good morning, Miss Erskine, and good-bye.”
He paused, thinking that perhaps her mood had been prompted by caprice, and that she might relent yet and call him back; but she made no movement at all beyond a bend of the head, and her voice was no kinder when she wished him farewell. Then he went, striding down the stairs and out into the street, resentful, angry, heartsore, little guessing how very much greater was the unhappiness he had left behind him where Jill, alone now in every sense of the word, stood battling with her grief and her emotion, and trying to face the difficulties which seemed crowding upon her on every side. She got out her satin work when he had gone and started upon the sachets with eager haste, glad of the miserable order now; for it kept her employed, and diverted the train of her thoughts. And all that day she sat working, working feverishly, dining, when the light failed so that she could see to paint no longer, off a crust of bread, the best her larder had to offer—indeed the only thing.
The next morning by the early post she received a letter from St. John. Her hand trembled so violently as she took it up that she could hardly unfasten the envelope, but, finally tearing it open she withdrew the contents, a sheet of notepaper with St. John’s compliments inscribed thereon, and enclosed within a cheque for the fee paid in full up to the end of the present quarter. The cheque fell to the ground unheeded but the sheet of paper Jill spread out on the table before her and then sat staring at it as though she could not take it in. It was the first brief missive of the sort that she had received; its very brevity chilled her. “With Mr St. John’s compliments.” So he had accepted his dismissal? It was better so, of course; but it was very hard to bear all the same.
Chapter Eight.
It was the Tuesday following that miserable and never to be forgotten Friday. Jill had been out in the morning to take back two of the sachets which she had finished, but had brought them back to make some alterations that the oily individual had pointed out to her in a playfully amorous fashion; a circumstance that had put her into as bad a temper as her grief stricken soul would allow. She sat on the red stool before her easel working, not at the sachets—she was too disgusted to touch them—but at her last canvas, with a lay figure posed in lieu of the model she could no longer employ. When the sound of someone mounting the stairs caused her heart to quicken its beating, and the tell-tale colour to come and go in her cheeks. It was St. John, she knew at once; very few men ascended those stairs, and only one with that quick decision born of familiarity. He knocked before entering, a ceremony that he had dispensed with altogether on class days when he had been a student; he did not, however, wait for permission to enter, but opened the door for himself. Jill’s mouth hardened obstinately as she glanced casually over her shoulder, and then, feigning not to see the bunch of flowers that he brought and laid humbly on the table as a peace-offering, went unmoved on with her work. She did not rise, did not even offer a word of greeting. St. John spoke first, awkwardly, deprecatingly, uncertain, what to make of her mood.