“Oh, yes. Sybil said he did. It’s all settled. She will be here to-morrow for the first sitting.”
Kirk spoke the fear that was in his mind.
“Ruth, old girl, I’m horribly nervous about this. I am taken with a sort of second sight. I see myself making a ghastly failure of this job and Bailey knocking me down and refusing to come across with the cheque.”
“Sybil is bringing the cheque with her to-morrow,” said Ruth simply.
“Is she?” said Kirk. “Now I wonder if that makes it worse or better. I’m trying to think!”
Sybil Wilbur fluttered in next day at noon, a tiny, restless creature who darted about the studio like a humming-bird. She effervesced with the joy of life. She uttered little squeaks of delight at everything she saw. She hugged Ruth, beamed at Kirk, went wild over William Bannister, thought the studio too cute for words, insisted on being shown all over it, and talked incessantly.
It was about two o’clock before she actually began to sit, and even then she was no statue. A thought would come into her small head and she would whirl round to impart it to Ruth, destroying in a second the pose which it had taken Kirk ten painful minutes to fix.
Kirk was too amused to be irritated. She was such a friendly little soul and so obviously devoted to Ruth that he felt she was entitled to be a nuisance as a sitter. He wondered more and more what weird principle of selection had been at work to bring Bailey and this butterfly together. He had never given any deep thought to the study of his brother-in-law’s character; but, from his small knowledge of him, he would have imagined some one a trifle more substantial and serious as the ideal wife for him. Life, he conceived, was to Bailey a stately march. Sybil Wilbur evidently looked on it as a mad gallop.
Ruth felt the same. She was fond of Sybil, but she could not see her as the fore-ordained Mrs. Bailey.
“I suppose she swept him off his feet,” she said. “It just shows that you never really get to know a person even if you’re their sister. Bailey must have all sorts of hidden sides to his character which I never noticed—unless she has. But I don’t think there is much of that about Sybil. She’s just a child. But she’s very amusing, isn’t she? She enjoys life so furiously.”