“Salvation!” he muttered, as he turned away to go to the inner room. “God bless you, darling! You are with me once again. I never wanted you worse.”
“It’s from his sweetheart over acrost the seas,” said Keren-Happuch, as she spread her dirty apron on the balustrade, so as not to soil the mahogany with her hand as she leaned upon it to go down, sadly. “And he’s in love, too; that’s what’s the matter with him. Puss, puss, puss!”
There was a soft mew, and a dirty-white cat trotted up to meet her, and leaped up to climb to her thin shoulders, and then rub its head affectionately against her head, to the disarrangement of her dirty cap.
“Ah! don’t stick your claws through my thin clothes.—Yes,” she mused, “he’s in love. Wonder what people feel like who are in love, and whether anybody ’ll ever love me. Don’t suppose any one ever will: I’m such a poor-looking sort o’ thing. But it don’t matter. You like me, don’t you, puss? And them as is in love don’t seem to be very happy after all.”
Chapter Nine.
The Model.
Armstrong Dale did not hear the door close. Picture—the Contessa—everything was forgotten, and for the time he was back in Boston. For he had thrown himself into a chair, and torn open the envelope. But he could not rest like that. He wanted room, and he came back to begin striding about his studio, reading as he walked.
But it did not seem to him like reading, for the words he scanned took life and light and tone as he grasped the pure, sweet, trusting words of the writer, breathing her intense love for the man to whom she had plighted her troth. And as in imagination he listened to the sweet breathings of her affection, and revelled in her homely prattle about those he knew, and her hopeful talk of the future, when he would have grown famous and returned home to the honours which would be showered upon him by his people—to the welcome for him in that one true throbbing heart, his own throbbed, too, heavily, and his eyes grew moist and dim.