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.