"When shall we have the first sitting, Mrs St. John?" he exclaimed after the usual greetings were over. "I am quite anxious to begin."

"Why not fix Monday?" suggested St. John amicably.

"Monday!" cried Jill. "It's washing day. How can you be so inconsiderate?"

"Oh, ah! washing day! I forgot. The atmosphere is composed of soap-suds, and we have cold meat. Not Monday, my dear boy; it is the most unG.o.dly day of the week."

"Tuesday would do," said Jill, "if that suits, and I think three o'clock would be the most convenient hour for me. The light, of course, is best in the mornings, but I am always busy then."

"Any time will suit me," Markham answered promptly, "and any day."

"Ah," said Jill with a little smile, "Jack was like that once. Why don't you get something to do?"

"Because it isn't necessary."

"But independence is such a grand thing," she persisted.

"Exactly. I inherited it, and I like it best that way."

Jill laughed.

"We can't all be workers, I suppose," she said, "yet I fancy if I had been given my choice I should have chosen that kind of independence.

Work is necessary to me."

"From a selfish point of view I am glad that it is; otherwise you wouldn't paint portraits."

"What makes you fancy that?" she asked.

"No one who paints as you do would undertake portraits if they could avoid it. I know a man who has always one canvas at least in the academy, but he can't afford to paint pictures now; they don't sell; so he does portraits."

Jill sighed.

"I am sorry for that man," she said, "his life must be a disappointment.

The people who want to be painted are generally so impossible."

"My dear girl," remonstrated St. John, "considering the circ.u.mstances that is one of the things better left unsaid."

"I am speaking from the artistic sense," she replied; "besides I said 'generally.'"

"I quite understand," interposed Markham laughing, "and entirely agree with you. But that won't interfere with the sitting on Tuesday, eh?"

"I hope not," she answered gravely; "I should be doubly sorry now if you didn't come."

"There is no fear of that," he said. "I enjoy seeing myself reproduced.

It is so often an improvement, you know, yet one invariably flatters oneself that it is as one habitually looks."

"We haven't done much to foster your conceit so far," she observed.

"Oh! I don't know," he answered. "I really thought that that last portrait was a bit like me. Somebody told me I did look like that sometimes when I had a liver attack."

"Evie said it was a libel," St. John remarked tentatively.

"Ah! Well, I should be sorry to contradict her," he replied, and Jill fancied, though she could not be quite sure, that he looked slightly displeased at the mention of Miss Bolton's name. Why should a name that had once been his sole subject of conversation excite his annoyance now?

It was not consistent. Had it been a case of unrequited affection she could have understood his being hurt, but displeasure was something she could not account for; it irritated her, why she could not have explained. She was not accustomed to a.n.a.lyse her sensations even to herself; it would have been wiser if she had; for her instinct was wonderfully true, and her nature peculiarly observant.

"You put me on my mettle," she said, smiling. "It shan't be a libel this time I promise you if infinite pains can prevent."

"I am not afraid to trust myself in your hands," he said.

Jill laughed.

"That's very fulsome flattery," she answered. "I was responsible for the libel, remember. Mr Thompkins declares that I shall ruin the firm yet. It is so humiliating because I was so positive at first that I was going to become one of those celebrated lady photographers who have all the best people sitting to them, and can charge any price they like."

"It's just as well as it is, perhaps," St. John rejoined with conviction. "Success would make you a horrid little prig, Jill; very few people can stand it."

"If Mr Markham were not here," Jill returned, "I would tell you what I think of you."

CHAPTER SIXTEEN.

Jill had got her canvas and everything in readiness, and was waiting for her model. She had been waiting for about ten minutes, and was growing slightly impatient; she hated wasting her time. St. John was busy in the studio, unusually busy, so that he could not possibly get away even for a few minutes. He wanted her badly, she knew; he always wanted a mate, and she felt rather as if she were shirking. She looked at the canvas in a dissatisfied kind of way, and then out of the window at the people in the street.

"I believe," she mused, thinking of the absent Markham, "that I could draw his face from memory."

Fetching a piece of paper she seated herself at the table and made a rough sketch in pencil as she had once done of St. John, only in St.

John's case she had not trusted to memory. Markham arrived while she was thus employed, and he stood by the table watching her, as she put in the finishing strokes. He smiled while he watched as though he were amused. Jill was grave and very much absorbed.

"What a wonderful little head it is," he said.

"Do you think so?" she asked, lifting the head he alluded to the better to regard the one on paper which he was not even looking at. "I don't call it wonderful, but I had an idea that I could catch the likeness; some faces are quite easily remembered."

"Yes," he acquiesced, "yours is."

"Mine? I don't agree with you; my features are too indescribable.

There. It's finished. I have caught the expression, haven't! But I haven't done justice to the nose. Will you sit in this chair near the window, please? you are dreadfully late, so we mustn't waste further time."

Jill worked rapidly, and there could not possibly be any question as to her ability. Markham watched her with interest, and every now and again he rose from his seat to have a look how the work progressed, notwithstanding her protest that it spoilt the pose.

"I can't help that," he declared, "it fascinates me, I must look."

"I had no idea before that you were so vain," she said.

"I'm not," he answered. "It isn't the subject that interests me but the work. I could stand behind you and watch you all day."

"Not having eyes at the back of my head I shouldn't make much progress with the portrait in that case," she retorted. "Do you mind going back to your seat, please, and allowing me to study your physiognomy again?"

He obeyed reluctantly, and for a time the work continued in silence; Jill was too engrossed to talk, and Markham apparently had no desire to.

He sat quite motionless watching her with a strained, intent, unfathomable expression in his glance that Jill in unconscious accuracy was transmitting to the painted eyes on the canvas, though the expression was by no means habitual to him, and gave the portrait an unlifelike appearance. She shook her head over it despondently, and stood back from the easel in order to take a better look.