uch, and I--I
think I'll start next week."

"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.

"You wretch!" she cried, shaking a bunch of lilies at Katherine, as she
stood in the narrow passage; "you're always going out when I'm coming
in."

"And you're always coming in when I'm going out. Isn't it funny?"

Audrey said nothing to that, but she kissed Katherine on both cheeks,
and pinned a bunch of lilies at her throat with a little gold pin that
she took from her own dress. Then she tripped lightly upstairs, with a
swish, swish, of her silk skirts, wafting lilies of the valley as she
went. Katherine watched her up the first flight, and the ha