"Thank you, dear boy; it's the very least you can do."
And they dropped the subject. Ted was the first to speak again.
"By-the-bye, what's on to-morrow morning, Kathy?"
"National Gallery for me." She looked up from her work and saw Ted standing with his hands in his pockets, gazing with an agonised expression at his portrait of Audrey.
"I suppose she is going to sit again?"
"Well, yes; she may look in for another hour in the morning perhaps."
Ted was not skillful in deceit, and something in his manner told Katherine that the sitting somehow depended on her absence. She began to see dimly why he had been so frightened at the idea of going to Paris. She looked over her shoulder.
"You haven't made the corners of her mouth turn up enough. It's just as well, they turn up too much."
"No, they don't; that's what makes her so pretty."
Katherine went to her work next morning in anything but a cheerful spirit. She had set her heart on Ted's studying abroad; and now Audrey had come in between, frittering away his time, and making him restless and unlike himself. To be sure, his powers had expanded enormously of late; but she was not happy about him, and was half afraid to praise his work. To her mind there was something feverish and unhealthy in its vivid beauty. It suggested genius outgrowing its strength. If Audrey really had anything to do with it, if she was coming in any way between him and the end she dreamed for him, why, then, she could hate Audrey with a deadly hatred. That was what she said to herself just before she opened the front-door and found Audrey standing on the doorstep, looking reprehensibly pretty in a gown of white lawn over green silk. Her wide hat was trimmed with bunches of white tulle and pale green poppies, and she had a little basket full of lilies of the valley hanging from her wrist.