“Why, so there are!” Katharine looked at the drawing in silence for a moment and collected herself. “The expression’s very good,” she said. “I like a picture when the eyes look right at you.”
She raised her own mechanically as she spoke, and she realized how white he was. She held out the drawing to him.
“Thanks, so much,” she said. “I’m glad to have seen it. It was so good of you. I really must be going now. It’s getting late.”
He took the drawing and laid it carefully upon the table, with the instinctive forethought of the artist for the safety of his work.
“Good-bye, Hester,” said Katharine, moving a step towards the window.
Hester turned abruptly. There were deep shadows under her eyes, and there was a bright colour in her face now, but not like that which had come to it when her husband had passed the door, singing. As she stood with her back against the bright light of the window, however, Katharine could hardly distinguish her features.
“Oh—good-bye,” said Hester in a strange, cold voice, not moving and not holding out her hand.
But Katharine extended her own, for she entirely refused to be treated as though she had injured her friend, just as a little while earlier, she had chosen to stay a few minutes rather than to take a hint so broad that it sounded like an order to go. She went nearer to the window.
“Good-bye, Hester,” she repeated, holding out her hand in such a way that Hester could not refuse to take it.
And Hester took it, but dropped it again instantly. Katharine nodded quietly, turned, nodded again to Crowdie in exactly the same way, and passed out through the open door, calmly and proudly, being quite sure that she had done nothing to be ashamed of. She knew, at the moment, that all hope of ever renewing her friendship was gone, at least for the present, and she regretted the fact to the last minute, and was willing to show that she did. Hester’s behaviour had been incomprehensible from the first, and it was still a mystery to Katharine when she left the house. One thing only was clear, and that was the woman’s uncontrollable jealousy during the little scene which had taken place. The idea of connecting that jealousy with former events never crossed the young girl’s mind, and of finding an original cause for it in the fact of Crowdie’s having sung at Mrs. Bright’s on a certain evening three weeks earlier. Still less could she have guessed that it had begun long ago, during the preceding winter, when she had sat for her portrait in Crowdie’s studio, while Hester lay extended upon the divan where she could watch her husband’s face, and note every passing look of admiration that crossed it, as he of necessity studied the features of his model. Such an idea was altogether too far removed from Katharine, in her ignorance of human nature—as far as Hester’s passion for her husband, which went beyond the limits of what the young girl had ever dreamed of in its excessive sensitiveness.