Part 42

"Or that I'm sorry I did it?"

"No; it's this cold that's making me so stupid."

"If he were to come back again this instant, I should have to tell him just the same, or else tell him about that--that--and you know I couldn't do that if I lived a thousand years."

Now she melted, indeed, and suffered Charmian to moan over her, and fortify her with all the reasons she had urged herself in various forms of repetition. Charmain showed her again how impossible everything that she had thought impossible was, and convinced her of every conviction. She made Cornelia's tragedy her romance, and solemnly exulted in its fatality, while she lifted her in her struggle of conscience to a height from which for the present at least, Cornelia could not have descended without a ruinous loss of self-respect. In the renunciation in which the worshipper confirmed her saint, Ludlow and his rights and feelings were ignored, and Cornelia herself was offered nothing more substantial than the prospect that henceforth she and Charmian could live for each other in a union that should be all principle on one side and all adoration on the other.

XXXIII.

Cornelia did not go to pass that week in Lent with Mrs. Westley. When she went, rather tardily, to withdraw her promise, she said that the time was now growing so short she must give every moment to the Synthesis. Mrs. Westley tacitly arranged to cancel some little plans she had made for her, and in the pity a certain harassed air of the girl's moved in her, she accepted her excuses as valid, and said, "But I am afraid you are overworking at the Synthesis, Miss Saunders. Are you feeling quite well?"

"Oh, perfectly," Cornelia answered with a false buoyancy from which she visibly fell. She looked down, and said, "I wish the work was twice as hard!"

"Ah, you have come to that very soon," said Mrs. Westley; and then they were both silent, till she added, "How are you getting on with your picture of Miss Maybough?"

"Oh, I'm not doing anything with that," said Cornelia, and she stood up to go.

"But you are going to exhibit it?" Mrs. Westley persisted.

"No, T don't know as I am. I should have to offer it first."

"It would be sure to be accepted; Mr. Ludlow thinks it would."

"Oh, yes; I know," said Cornelia, feeling herself get very red. "But I guess I won't offer it. Goodbye."

Mrs. Westley kept the impression of something much more personal than artistic in Cornelia's reference to her picture, and when she met Ludlow a few days after, she asked him if he knew that Miss Saunders was not going to offer her picture to the Exhibition.

He said simply that he did not know it.

"Don't you think she ought? I don't think she's looking very well, of late; do you?"

"I don't know; isn't she? I haven't seen her----" He began carelessly; he added anxiously. "When did you see her?"

"A few days ago. She came to say she could not take the time from the Synthesis to pay me that little visit. I'm afraid she's working too hard. Of course, she's very ambitious; but I can't understand her not wanting to show her picture, there, and trying to sell it."

Ludlow stooped forward and pulled the long ears of Mrs. Westley's fashionable dog which lay on the rug at his feet.

"Have you any idea why she's changed her mind?"

"Yes," said Ludlow. "I think it's because I helped her with it."

"Is she so independent? Or perhaps I am not quite discreet----"

"Why not? You say she didn't look well?"

"She looked--worried."

He asked, as if it immediately followed, "Mrs. Westley, should you mind giving me a little advice about a matter--a very serious matter?"

"If you won't follow it."

"Do we ever?"

"Well?"