"We've had so many, many interruptions, though, that it is surprising how slow it is moving.

In the first place, Miss Winthrop is gone more than half the time (she goes again to-morrow for a week!), and in this portrait I'm not painting a stroke without my model before me.

I mean to take no chances, you see; and Miss Winthrop is perfectly willing to give me all the sittings I wish for.

Of course, if she hadn't changed the pose and costume so many times, it would have been done long ago--and she knows it." "Of course--she knows it," murmured Billy, a little faintly, but with a peculiar intonation in her voice.
"And so you see," sighed Bertram, "what the twentieth of March is going to mean for me." "It's going to mean a splendid triumph!" asserted Billy; and this time her voice was not faint, and it carried only a ring of loyal confidence.
"You blessed comforter!" murmured Bertram, giving with his eyes the caress that his lips would so much have preferred to give--under more propitious circumstances..