"How curious!" he exclaimed. "What was her name?"
"There you have me," admitted the agent, after brain-fagging efforts. "I can't recollect. I sold the property very soon."
XXVI
Rid of them all, Jean was tormented by a host of replies and courses of action, any one of which, she believed, would have blunted the edge of Julie's suspicion. For she was suspicious! There could be no doubt of it. To Craig she longed to offer some explanation, but her love bade her reject anything short of the whole truth, even as it told her that the whole truth was impossible. Every hour of her wedded happiness heaped proof on proof of the joy he took in the belief that he alone had filled her heart. And was he not right? Had not his dear image persisted—canonized, enshrined, worshiped—since their forest meeting! Paul had never displaced it. In truth, it had shone the brighter because of Paul. But how put this holy mystery in words!
She took refuge in an opportunism not unlike Amy's. Did not time and chance rule the world! Yet her peace of mind was fitful, and she shunned the Copley Studios with a fear which hearkened to no argument. It was useless to remind herself that Satterlee was a man of many interests. Her imagination always figured him as haunting the room where she had come upon him. There he waited, a rotund bomb by the mantelpiece, with the explosive "Bartlett" in his subconsciousness ready to destroy her the instant her face should at last apply the fatal spark. So it fell out that, pleading her own work whenever Craig, himself absorbed in the Hepworth portrait, asked her opinion of his sister's ideas, the new studio's furnishing went forward without her and in unhampered accord with Julie's ambitious plans.
How far-reaching these plans were she first adequately perceived through MacGregor, whose card came up to her one evening when both Atwood and Mrs. Van Ostade were out.
"I counted on finding you alone," he owned with characteristic bluntness. "Craig has gone to the Salmagundi doings, of course,—I'm due there later; while I happen to know that Julie is dining with her mother-in-law. I met Julie this afternoon at the Copley Studios."
"Then you saw Craig's new quarters?"
"Yes. Have you seen them?"