Christine went up the steps with the baby, and as he had her bag and shawl Noel followed, telling the driver to wait.
It was a miserable little house, poor and cheap, and empty, and but for the counteracting effect of his anger against Dallas, Noel thought he must have almost sobbed to see Christine here. Dallas himself was not at all discomposed as he recognized his visitor and asked him in, offering a hand which Noel managed to touch.
The baby was still asleep, and when Christine had placed it carefully on a wretched little couch, she seemed, for the first time, free to think of Noel. She turned and asked him to sit down—at the same time glancing about her with a sudden rush of consciousness, which until now a nearer interest had crowded out. The poverty-stricken look of her surroundings was made the more evident by the few objects belonging to other days that lay about—a charming sacque, smartly braided and lined with rich silk, hung on the back of a chair, and a handsome travelling rug was folded under the baby on the sofa. Everything was clean, for Christine even yet had not come to contemplate the possibility of doing without a servant.
There was a small kerosene lamp on a table, over which were spread a lot of cards with their faces up. Some one had evidently been playing solitaire, and as evidently, on the witness of another sense, been accompanying the game by the smoking of bad tobacco. The room reeked with it to a degree that made Noel feel it an outrage to Christine. But what was he to do? There was but one thing. He said good-by and went away, carrying the memory of Christine’s face flushed scarlet for shame.
He remembered afterward that Dallas had taken no notice of the baby—not even glancing at it or inquiring for it—a thing which the poor mother had taken as a matter of course. He thought, as he shook hands with her at parting, that Christine had tried to speak—perhaps a word of thanks—but something stopped it and she let him go in silence.
The next afternoon Noel, at the same hour, went down to the wharf and boarded the excursion boat, for the deliberate purpose of having some practical talk with Christine. He soon found her, absorbed so completely in the baby that his coming seemed scarcely to disturb for a moment the intentness of her preoccupation. This, at first, made him feel a certain irritation, but he soon had reason to congratulate himself upon an absence of self-consciousness on her part which made it the easier for him to put certain questions. Everything he inquired about she responded to with absolute honesty and a sort of vagueness which precluded any such feelings as wounded pride. He learned, by his adroit questionings, that they were now very poor, that Dallas had been spending his principal, which was now exhausted, and that their chief means of support was the money she obtained for doing a very elaborate sort of embroidery which she had learned while at the convent. When he asked if she had all the work she wanted she said no, and that she often rang door-bells and asked ladies to give her work and was refused. She told all this with apathy, however, and seemed to have no power of acute feeling outside of her child.
Then Noel, with a beating heart, made a proposal to her which had occurred to him during the wakeful hours of the night, but which he had felt he should hardly have courage for. This was that she should come every day and give him sittings for a new picture he had in mind. When he suggested it, to his delight she caught eagerly at the idea, accepting every word he said in absolute good faith, and showing no disposition to doubt when he told her that every hour would be many times more valuable so spent than in sewing, as good models were rare and very well paid. She thanked him with the simplest gratitude, and when she heard that she would be allowed to bring her child with her she promised to come the next morning to his studio. The baby, she said, was better now, and would sleep for hours at a time, and in the afternoon she could take him on the water as usual. It was evident that there was no one else who made any demand upon her time—a significant fact to Noel.
Accordingly, next morning she came, her baby in her arms as usual. She had made an effort to dress herself attractively, looking upon the matter in a very businesslike way, and so girlish and charming and delicately high-bred did she look in her French-made gown of transparent black, with trimmings of pale green ribbons, and a wide lace hat to match, that Noel rebelled with all his might against her lugging that absurdly superfluous baby up those long steps. Still it was necessary to accept the inevitable, and he set his teeth and said nothing. When she had laid the sleeping child upon a lounge and turned toward him, her eyes fastened eagerly upon a great bunch of crimson roses in a blue china bowl, which Noel had gotten in honor of her coming. She did not, of course, suspect this, but he saw that here, at least, was a vivid and spontaneous feeling apart from her child, as she bent above the mass of rich color.
“Oh, how good they are!” she said. “I seem to want to eat them, and smell them and look at them all at once.”