"Jack, come and see me again soon."
"When may I come? Not to-morrow—that would be too soon. The day after. Phil, make me the likeness, and send it to me by post. I forgot you cannot write."
He wrote his address on a sheet of foolscap.
"Fold it in that, with this address outside, and post it to me. Come again, Phil? I should like to come every day, and stay all day." He pressed her hand and was gone.
Phillis remained standing where he left her. What had happened to her? Why did she feel so oppressed? Why did the tears crowd her eyes? Five o'clock. It wanted an hour of dinner, when she would have to talk to the Twin brethren. She gathered up her drawings and retreated to her own room. As she passed Humphrey's door, she heard him saying to Jane:
"The tea, Jane? Have I really been asleep? A most extraordinary thing for me."
"Now he will see the drawing of the 'Artist at Work,'" thought Phillis. But she did not laugh at the idea, as she had done when she perpetrated the joke. She had suddenly grown graver.
She began her own likeness at once. But she could not satisfy herself. She tore up half a dozen beginnings. Then she changed her mind. She drew a little group of two. One was a young man, tall, shapely, gallant, with a queer attractive face, who held the hands of a girl in his, and was bending over her. Somehow a look of love, a strange and new expression, which she had never seen before in human eyes, lay in his. She blushed while she drew her own face looking up in that other, and yet she drew it faithfully, and was only half conscious how sweet a face she drew and how like it was to her own. Nor could she understand why she felt ashamed.
"Come again soon, Jack."
The words rang in the young man's ears, but they rang like bells of accusation and reproach. This girl, so sweet, so fresh, so unconventional, what would she think when she learned, as she must learn some day, how great was his sin against her? And what would Lawrence Colquhoun say! And what would the lawyer say? And what would the world say?