"'ELSIE MAYHEW.'"
"Tiens! How is that for your 'child of twenty'? It is the letter of a woman; and a woman with an exquisite sense of her own dignity into the bargain."
Quita smiled thoughtfully as she buttered her toast.
"I am wondering how she would have answered if you had asked her," was all she said. "I don't feel quite so certain as I did last night."
"Ni moi non plus. Which makes the situation just twice as interesting. For all the Button Quail's beak and claws, I fancy I shall see more of my Undine yet!"
With a chuckle of satisfaction, he fell to re-reading Elsie's note: and
Quita, immersed in her own affairs, promptly forgot them both.
An hour later she reappeared—her whole face and form radiating the light within; went straight to her easel, flung aside its draperies, and surveying her work of the previous day, found it very good. But there were certain lines and shadows that displeased her critical eye. She would study his face afresh this morning, with the twofold appreciation of heart and brain, and surprise him with the picture when it was nearer completion.
Just then the bearer, entering, handed her a note. She opened it eagerly—recognising Eldred's handwriting—and read, with a bewilderment bordering on despair, the stoical statement of facts set down by Lenox in the first bitterness of disappointment, ten hours ago. The shock staggered her like a blow between the eyes. Her lips parted and closed on a soundless exclamation. The abrupt change in her face was as if a light had been suddenly blown out.
"Mon Dieu, . . . cholera!" she murmured helplessly, putting one hand over her eyes as if to shut out the horror of it. "This is my punishment for ever having let him go."
Then, as if in hope of discovering some mitigation of her sentence, she re-read the short letter, lingering on the last paragraph, which alone contained some ray of comfort, some assurance of the strong love that was at once the cause and the anodyne of their mutual pain.