THE look of illness that Morland had noticed upon Jimmie's face was due to the fact that he had been ill. Italian townlets nestling on hillsides are picturesque, but they are not always healthy. A touch of fever had laid him on his back for a week, and caused the local doctor to order him to England. He had arrived in a limp condition, much to the anxiety of Aline, who had expected to see the roses return to his cheek as soon as their slender baggage had passed the custom-house. He was shabbily dressed because he had fallen on evil times, and had no money to waste on personal vanities. The four guineas which Aline had put aside out of their limited resources to buy him a new suit he had meanly abstracted from the housekeeping drawer, and had devoted, with the surreptitious help of the servant, to purchasing necessary articles of attire for Aline. He was looking worried because he had forgotten in which of the cheap Oxford Street restaurants he had promised to meet that young lady. When he remembered, the cloud passed from his face and he darted across the road behind Morland's brougham. He found Aline seated primly at a little marble table on which were a glass of milk and a lump of amorphous pastry for herself, and a plate of cold beef and a small bottle of Bass for Jimmie. It was too early for the regular crowd of lunchers—only half-past twelve—and the slim, erect little figure looked oddly alone in the almost empty restaurant.

Jimmie nodded in a general, kindly way at the idle waitresses about the buffet, and marched down the room with a quick step, his eyes beaming. He sat down with some clatter opposite Aline, and took two cheques, a bank-note and a handful of gold and silver from his pocket, and dumped them noisily on the table.

“There, my child. Seven pounds ten. Twenty-five guineas. Five pounds. And eight pounds three-and-six-pence. Exit wolf at the door, howling, with his tail between his legs.”

Aline looked at the wealth with knitted brow.

“Can I take this?” she asked, lifting up the five-pound note.

Jimmie pushed the pile towards her. “Take it all, my dear. What on earth should I do with it? Besides, it's all your doing.”

“Because I made you go and dun those horrid dealers? And even now Hyam has only given you half. It was fifty guineas—Oh, Jimmie! Do you mean to say you forgot? Now, what did you tell him? Did you produce the agreement?”

Jimmie looked at her ruefully.

“I'm afraid I forgot the wretched agreement. I went in and twirled my moustache fiercely, and said 'Mr. Hyam, I want my money.'”

Aline laughed. “And you took him by the throat. I know. Oh, you foolish person!”

“Well, he asked me if twenty-five would be enough—and it's a lot of money, you know, dear—and I thought if I did n't say 'yes,' he would n't give me anything. In business affairs one has to be diplomatic.”

“I'll have to take Hyam in hand myself,” said Aline, decisively. “Well, he'll have to pay up some day. Then there's Blathwayt & Co.,—and Tilney—that's quite right—but where did you get all that gold from, Jimmie?”

“Oh, that was somebody else,” he said vaguely. Then turning to the waitress, who had sauntered up to open the bottle of Bass, he pointed at Aline's lunch.

“Do you mind taking away that eccentric pie-thing and bringing the most nutritious dish you have in the establishment?”

“But, Jimmie, this is a Bath bun. It's delicious,” protested Aline.

“My dear child, growing girls cannot be fed like bears on buns. Ah, here,” he said to the waitress who showed him the little wooden-handled frame containing the tariff, “bring this young lady some galantine of chicken.”

Aline, who in her secret heart loved the “eccentric pie-thing” beyond all other dainties, and trembled at the stupendous charge, possibly ninepence or a shilling, that would be made for the galantine, yielded, after the manner of women, because she knew it would please Jimmie. But accustomed to his diplomatic methods, she felt that a red herring—or a galantine—had been drawn across the track.

“Who was the somebody else?” she asked.

He nodded and drank a draught of beer and wiped the froth from his moustache. Something unusual in his personal appearance suddenly caught her attention. His watch-chain was dangling loose from the buttonhole of his waistcoat.

“Your watch!” she gasped.

Dissimulation being vain, Jimmie confessed.

“You told me this morning, my dear, that if we didn't get fifty pounds to-day we were ruined. You spoke alarmingly of the workhouse. My debt collecting amounted to thirty-eight pounds fifteen. I tried hard to work the obdurate bosom up to eleven pounds five, but he would only give me eight.”

“You don't mean to say you have sold your beautiful gold watch for eight pounds?” cried the girl, turning as pale as the milk in front of her.

It had been a present from a wealthy stockbroker who had been delighted with his portrait painted by Jimmie a couple of years ago, and it was thick and heavy and the pride of Aline's existence. It invested Jimmie with an air of solidity, worldly substantiality; and it was the only timekeeper they had ever had in the house which properly executed its functions. Now he had sold it! Was there ever so exasperating a man? He was worse than Moses with his green spectacles. But Jimmie reassured her. He had only pawned the watch at Attenborough's over the way.

“Then give me the ticket, do, or you'll lose it, Jimmie.”

He meekly obeyed. Aline began her galantine with a sigh of relief, and condescended to laugh at Jimmie's account of his exploits. But when the meal was ended, she insisted on redeeming the precious watch, and much happier in knowing it safe in his pocket, she carried him off to a ready-made tailor's, where she ordered him a beautiful thin overcoat for thirty shillings, a neat blue serge suit for three pounds ten, handing over in payment the five-pound note she had abstracted from his gleanings, and a new hat, for which she paid from a mysterious private store of her own. These matters having been arranged to her satisfaction, she made up for her hectoring ways by nestling against him on top of the homeward-bound omnibus and telling him what a delightful, lovely morning they had spent.

Thus it will be seen that Jimmie, aided by Aline's stout little heart, was battling more than usual against adversity. Aline had many schemes. Why should she not obtain some lucrative employment? Jimmie made a wry face at the phrase and protested vehemently against the suggestion. A hulking varlet like him to let her wear her fingers to the bone by addressing envelopes at twopence a million? He would sooner return to the five-shillings-a-dozen oil paintings; he would go round the streets at dawn and play “ghost” to pavement artists; he would take in washing! The idea of the street-pictures caught his fancy. He expatiated upon its advantages. Five pitches, say at two shillings a pitch, that would be ten shillings a day—three pounds a week. A most business-like plan, to say nothing of the education in art it would be to the public! He had his own fantastical way of dealing with the petty cares of life. As for Aline working, he would not hear of it. Though they lived now from hand to mouth, they were always fed. He had faith in the ravens.

But all the fantasy and the faith could not subdue Aline's passionate rebellion against Jimmie's ostracism. She was very young, very feminine; she had not his wide outlook, his generous sympathies, his disdain of trivial, ignoble things, his independence of soul. The world was arrayed against Jimmie. Society was persecuting him with monstrous injustice. She hated his oppressors, longed fiercely for an opportunity of vindicating his honour. It was sometimes more than she could bear—to think of his straitened means, the absence of sitters, the lowered prices he obtained, the hours of unremitting toil he spent at his easel and drawing-table. During their travels she had not realised what the scandal would mean to him professionally. Now her heart rose in hot revolt and thirsted for battle in Jimmie's cause.

Her heart had never been hotter than one morning when, the gem of his finished Italian studies having been rejected by the committee of a minor exhibition, she went down to the studio to give vent to her indignation. At breakfast Jimmie had laughed and kissed her and told her not to drop tears into his coffee. He would send the picture to the Academy, where it would be hung on the line and make him famous. He refused to be downhearted and talked buoyantly of other things. But Aline felt that it was only for her sake that he hid his bitter disappointment, and an hour later she could bear the strain of silence no longer.

The door of the studio was open. The girl's footstep was soft, and, not hearing it, he did not turn as she entered. For a few seconds she stood watching him; feeling shy, embarrassed, an intruder upon unexpected sacred things. Jimmie's mind was far away from minor exhibitions. He was sitting on his painting-stool, chin in hand, looking at a picture on the easel. On his face was unutterable pain, in his eyes an agony of longing. Aline caught her breath, frightened at the revelation. The eyes of the painted Norma smiled steadfastly into his. The horrible irony of it smote the girl. Another catch at the breath became a choking sob. Jimmie started, and as if a magic hand had passed across his features, the pain vanished, and Aline saw the homely face again with its look of wistful kindness. Overwrought, she broke into a passion of weeping. Jimmie put his arms about her and soothed her. What did the rejection of a picture matter? It was part of the game of painting. She must be his own brave little girl and smile at the rubs of fortune. But Aline shook the head buried on his shoulder, and stretched out a hand blindly towards the portrait. “It's that. I can't bear it.”

An impossible thought shot through him. He drew away from her and caught her wrists somewhat roughly, and tried to look at her; but she bowed her head.

“What do you mean, my child?” he asked curtly, with bent brows.

Women are lightning-witted in their interpretation of such questions. The blood flooded her face, and her tears dried suddenly and she met his glance straight.

“Do you think I'm jealous? Do you suppose I have n't known? I can't bear you to suffer. I can't bear her not to believe in you. I can't bear her not to love you.”

Jimmie let go her wrists and stood before her full of grateful tenderness, quite at a loss for words. He looked whimsically at the flushed, defiant little face; he shook her by the shoulder and turned away.

“My valiant tin soldier,” he said.

It was an old name for her, dating from nursery days, when they thought and talked according to the gospel of Hans Christian Andersen.

No more passed between them. But thenceforward Jimmie put the finishing touches to the portrait openly, Instead of painting at it when he knew he should be undisturbed. The wedding was drawing near. The date had been announced in the papers, and Jimmie had put a cross against it in his diary. If only Norma would accept the portrait as a wedding-present, he would feel happier. But how to approach her he did not know. In her pure eyes, he was well aware, he must appear the basest of men, and things proceeding from him would bear a taint of the unspeakable. Yet he hungered for her acceptance. It was the most perfect picture he had painted or could ever paint. The divinest part of him had gone to the making of it. It held in its passionate simplicity the man's soul, as the Monna Lisa in its mysterious complexity holds Leonardo's. Of material symbols of things spiritual he could not give her more. But how to give?

Connie Deering settled the question by coming to the studio one morning, a bewildering vision of millinery and smiles and kindness.

“You have persistently refused, you wicked bear, to come and see me since my return to London, so I have no choice but to walk into your den. If it had n't been for Aline, beyond an occasional 'Dear Connie, I am very well. The weather is unusually warm for the time of year. Yours sincerely, J. P.', I should n't know whether you were alive or dead. I hope you're ashamed of yourself.”

This was the little lady's exordium, to which she tactfully gave Jimmie no time to reply. She stayed for an hour. The disastrous topic was avoided. But Jimmie felt that she forbore to judge him for his supposed offence, and learned to his great happiness that Norma had asked after his welfare, and would without doubt deign in her divine graciousness to accept the portrait. She looked thoughtfully at the picture for some time, and then laid a light touch on his arm.

“How you must love her, Jimmie!” she said in a low voice. “I have n't forgotten.”

“I wish you would,” he answered gravely. “I oughtn't to have said what I did. I don't remember what I did say. I lost my head and raved. Every man has his hour of madness, and that was mine—all through your witchery. And yet somehow it seemed as if I were pouring it all out to her.”

Connie Deering perceptibly winced. Plucking up courage, she began:

“I wish a man would—”

“My dear Connie,” Jimmie interrupted kindly, “there are hundreds of men in London who are sighing themselves hoarse for you. But you are such a hard-hearted butterfly.”

Her lips twitched. “Not so hard-hearted as you think, my good Jimmie,” she retorted.

A moment later she was all inconsequence and jest. On parting he took both her white-gloved little hands.

“You can't realise the joy it has been to me to see you, Connie,” he said. “It has been like a ray of sunlight through prison bars.”

After a private talk with Aline she drove straight to Devonshire Place, and on the way dabbed her eyes with the inconsiderable bit of chiffon called a handkerchief which she carried in her gold chain purse. She saw Norma alone for a moment before lunch, and told her of her visit.

“I don't care what he has done,” she declared desperately. “I am not going to let it make a difference any longer. He's the same dear creature I have known all my life, and I don't believe he has done anything at all. If there's a sinner in that horrible business, it is n't Jimmie!”

Norma looked out of the window at the bleak March day.

“That is what Theodore Weever said,” she answered tonelessly.

“Then why don't you give Jimmie the benefit of the doubt?”

“It is better that I should n't.”

“Why, dear?”

“You are a sweet little soul, Connie,” said Norma, her eyes still fixed on the grey sky. “But you may do more harm than good. I am better as I am. I have benumbed myself into a decent state of insensibility and I don't want to feel anything ever again as long as I live.”

The door opened, and Mrs. Hardacre appeared on the threshold. Connie bent forward and whispered quickly into Norma's ear:

“One would think you were afraid to believe in Jimmie.”

She swung round, flushed, femininely excited at having seized the unfair moment for dealing a stab.

“I hope I have made her feel,” she thought, as she fluttered forward to greet Mrs. Hardacre.

She succeeded perhaps beyond her hope. A sharp glance showed her Norma still staring out of window, but staring now with an odd look of fear and pain. Her kind heart repented.

“Forgive me if I hurt you,” she said on their way downstairs to lunch.

“What does it matter?” Norma answered by way of pardon.

But the shrewd thrust mattered exceedingly. After Connie had gone, the wound ached, and Norma found that her boast of having benumbed herself was a vain word. In the night she lay awake, frightened at the reaction that was taking place. Theodore Weever had shaken her more than she had realised. Connie Deering proclaimed the same faith. She felt that she too would have to accept it—against argument, against reason, against fact. She would have to accept it wholly, implicitly; and she dreaded the act of faith. Her marriage with Morland was fixed for that day week, and she was agonisingly aware that she loved another man with all her heart.

The next day she received a hurried note from Connie Deering:

“Do come in for half an hour for tea on Sunday. I have a beautiful wedding-present to show you which I hope you'll like, as great pains have been spent over it. And I want to have a last little chat with you.”

She promised unreflectingly, seeing no snare. But as she walked to Bryanston Square on Sunday afternoon, more of a presentiment, a foreboding of evil, than a suspicion fixed itself upon her mind, and she wished she had not agreed to come. She was shown into the drawing-room, and there, beside a gilt-framed picture over which a cloth was thrown, with her great brown eyes meeting her defiantly, stood Aline.