"I'm so glad I went. Thank you, ever so much," Justine said, and there was a song in her voice.
Her step was light and full of life as she sped up the path to the door of the cottage.
"Thank the Lord," thought 'Gene, as he strode off into the night, "I guess it was all right for her, after all. She's been happy to-night."
CHAPTER XXI.
THE COMING IN THE NIGHT.
Soon after their return to Chicago, Celeste began to observe changes in her husband's manner. He gave up newspaper illustrating and went in for water colors and began to take lessons in oil painting. The cleverness of Jud Sherrod, the boy, was not wanting in the man. In a short time the born artist in him was mastering the difficulties of color and he was painting in a manner that surprised not only his critical friends but himself. He toiled hard and faithfully; his little studio on the top floor of their home was always a place of activity.
Feverishly he began these first attempts at coloring, Celeste his only critic. With loving yet honest eyes she saw the faults, the virtues and the improvement. He worked day and night, despite her expostulations. The bright eyes he turned to her when he took them from the canvas were not the gray, hungry ones that dulled into reverie when he was alone with his pigments. His eyes saw two dancing faces in the colors as he spread them: one dark, distressed, and weary, the other fair, bright, and happy.
There came to him a powerful desire to see Justine, but with it the fear that he could not leave her if he again felt her presence touching his. For an hour at a time, day after day, he would hold Celeste in his arms, uttering no word, stroking her hair, caressing her face, gloomily repentant. The enormity of his mistake—he would not call it crime—had come full upon him. It was not that he had broken the laws of the land, but that he had deceived—deceived.
Men about town remarked the change and wondered. Douglass Converse, in anxiety, sought to ascertain the cause, fearing to find Celeste unhappy. She was, beyond doubt, blissfully happy, and he fell back upon the old solution: Sherrod was not well. The latter, in response to blunt questioning, told him he was not sick, not tired, not worried, but his heart quaked with the discovery that the eyes of his friends were upon him and always questioning.