CHAPTER XIX. ALICE GREGGORY

Christmas came and went; and in a flurry of snow and sleet January
arrived. The holidays over, matters and things seemed to settle down to
the winter routine.

Miss Winthrop had prolonged her visit in Washington until after
Christmas, but she had returned to Boston now--and with her she had
brought a brand-new idea for her portrait; an idea that caused her to
sweep aside with superb disdain all poses and costumes and sketches to
date, and announce herself with disarming winsomeness as "all ready now
to really begin!"

Bertram Henshaw was vexed, but helpless. Decidedly he wished to paint
Miss Marguerite Winthrop's portrait; but to attempt to paint it when all
matters were not to the lady's liking were worse than useless, unless
he wished to hang this portrait in the gallery of failures along with
Anderson's and Fullam's--and that was not the goal he had set for it. As
to the sordid money part of the affair--the great J. G. Winthrop himself
had come to the artist, and in one terse sentence had doubled the
original price and expressed himself as hopeful that Henshaw would put
up with "the child's notions." It was the old financier's next sentence,
however, that put the zest of real determination into Bertram, for
because of it, the artist saw what this portrait was going to mean to
the stern old man, and how dear was the original of it to a heart that
was commonly reported "on the street" to be made of stone.

Obviously, then, indeed, there was nothing for Bertram Henshaw to do
but to begin the new portrait. And he began it--though still, it must be
confessed, with inward questionings. Before a week had passed, however,
every trace of irritation had fled, and he was once again the absorbed
artist who sees the vision of his desire taking palpable shape at the
end of his brush.

"It's all right," he said to Billy then, one evening. "I'm glad she
changed. It's going to be the best, the very best thing I've ever
done--I think! by the sketches."

"I'm so glad!" exclaimed Billy. "I'm so glad!" The repetition was
so vehement that it sounded almost as if she were trying to convince
herself as well as Bertram of something that was not true.

But it was true--Billy told herself very indignantly that it was; indeed
it was! Yet the very fact that she had to tell herself this, caused her
to know how perilously near she was to being actually jealous of that
portrait of Marguerite Winthrop. And