The man was broken-hearted; he suffered tortures of loneliness, disappointment, doubt, self-depreciation. He waited, held at his work by a dependent widowed mother; hoping against hope that his lost one would come back. The girl meanwhile made good in her art work; she was not a great sculptor but a popular portraitist and maker of little genre groups. She had other offers, but refused them, being hardened in her ambitions, and, possibly, still withheld by her early love.
The man after two or three years of empty misery and hard grinding work, falls desperately ill; the pretty cousin helps the mother nurse him, and shows her own affection. He offers the broken remnants of his heart, which she eagerly undertakes to patch up; and they become tolerably happy, at least she is.
But the young sculptor in Paris! Rosamond hurried through the pages to the last chapter. There was the haughty and triumphant heroine in her studio. She had been given a medal—she had plenty of orders—she had just refused a Count. Everyone had gone, and she sat alone in her fine studio, self-satisfied and triumphant.
Then she picks up an old American paper which was lying about; reads it idly as she smokes her cigarette—and then both paper and cigarette drop to the floor, and she sits staring.
Then she starts up—her arms out—vainly. "Wait! O Wait!" she cries—"I was coining back,"—and drops into her chair again. The fire is out. She is alone.
Rosamond shut the book and leaned back upon her pillow. Her eyes were shut tight; but a little gleaming line showed on either cheek under the near light. She put the light out and lay quite still.
*
Allen G. Goddard, in his capacity as "reader" was looking over some popular English novels which his firm wished to arrange about publishing in America. He left "Two and One" to the last. It was the second edition, the illustrated one which he had not seen yet; the first he had read before. He regarded it from time to time with a peculiar expression.
"Well," he said to himself, "I suppose I can stand it if the others do."
And he opened the book.
The drawing was strong work certainly, in a style he did not know. They were striking pictures, vivid, real, carrying out in last detail the descriptions given, and the very spirit of the book, showing it more perfectly than the words. There was the tender happiness of the lovers, the courage, the firmness, the fixed purpose in the young sculptor insisting on her freedom, and the gay pride of the successful artist in her work.