“You needn’t try to wheedle me. I don’t know where he is, and, what’s more, I don’t care, as long as he keeps away from here.”
“But, Will, you must have some reason——”
“Reason enough,” he interrupted rudely; “and that’s all you’ll get out of me in a thousand years.” And he lighted a cigarette and put distance between himself and the chance of further questioning.
Knowing nothing of Harding or his story, Dorothy set her brother’s anger down to the account of a natural feeling of resentment toward a comparative stranger who had interfered in Will’s private affair. None the less, the incident added another shrouding to the mystery involving the draughtsman, and Dorothy’s curiosity and concern went one step farther on the road toward anxiety.
It was about this time that she began to notice a rather remarkable change in Isabel. From being the most outspoken member of the family, the younger sister had developed a degree of reticence which was second only to Will’s churlishness, though Dorothy fancied it was sorrowful rather than sullen. From day to day she spent less time at her easel, and twice Dorothy had come upon her when her eyes were red with weeping. To inquiry, jesting or solicitous, she was stonily impervious, and when the thing became unbearable Dorothy went to her mother again, meaning to be at the heart of things if persistence could find the way. She chose her time cunningly, attacking after her mother had gone to bed, so there would be no chance of retreat.
“How should I know, dear?” was the mother’s reply to her first question about Isabel. “I haven’t noticed anything wrong with her.”
“But there is something wrong,” Dorothy insisted. “She hasn’t been like herself for days. She mopes, and she doesn’t paint; and twice I have caught her crying, though she denied it spitefully.”
Mrs. Langford’s answer to that was conventionally sympathetic.
“It is another of the unthinkable pictures, I suppose. I do wish the child wouldn’t torment herself so over her work. It is all well enough as an accomplishment, but she needn’t make a martyr of herself. Harry is quite right about that.”
Having a very considerable reverence for art, Dorothy was not so sure of this, but she left the point uncontested and asked a question suggested by the mention of Harry Antrim.