FullReads

“Sold that watercolour of the obelisk to a man from Peoria,” he announced overwhelmingly.

“Don’t joke with me,” said Delia, “not from Peoria!”

“All the way. I wish you could see him, Dele. Fat man with a woollen muffler and a quill toothpick. He saw the sketch in Tinkle’s window and thought it was a windmill at first, he was game, though, and bought it anyhow. He ordered another–an oil sketch of the Lackawanna freight depot–to take back with him. Music lessons! Oh, I guess Art is still in it.”

“I’m so glad you’ve kept on,” said Delia, heartily. “You’re bound to win, dear. Thirty-three dollars! We never had so much to spend before. We’ll have oysters to-night.”

“And filet mignon with champignons,” said Joe. “Were is the olive fork?”

On the next Saturday evening Joe reached home first. He spread his $18 on the parlour table and washed what seemed to be a great deal of dark paint from his hands.

Half an hour later Delia arrived, her right hand tied up in a shapeless bundle of wraps and bandages.

“How is this?” asked Joe after the usual greetings. Delia laughed, but not very joyously.

Clementina,” she explained, “insisted upon a Welsh rabbit after her lesson. She is such a queer girl. Welsh rabbits at 5 in the afternoon. The General was there. You should have seen him run for the chafing dish, Joe, just as if there wasn’t a servant in the house. I know Clementina isn’t in good health; she is so nervous. In serving the rabbit she spilled a great lot of it, boiling hot, over my hand and wrist. It hurt awfully, Joe. And the dear girl was so sorry! But Gen. Pinkney!–Joe, that old man nearly went distracted. He rushed downstairs and sent somebody–they said the furnace man or somebody in the basement–out to a drug store for some oil and things to bind it up with. It doesn’t hurt so much now.”

“What’s this?” asked Joe, taking the hand tenderly and pulling at some white strands beneath the bandages.

“It’s something soft,” said Delia, “that had oil on it. Oh, Joe, did you sell another sketch?” She had seen the money on the table.

“Did I?” said Joe; “just ask the man from Peoria. He got his depot to-day, and he isn’t sure but he thinks he wants another parkscape and a view on the Hudson. What time this afternoon did you burn your hand, Dele?”

“Five o’clock, I think,” said Dele, plaintively. “The iron–I mean the rabbit came off the fire about that time. You ought to have seen Gen. Pinkney, Joe, when–“

“Sit down here a moment, Dele,” said Joe. He drew her to the couch, sat beside her and put his arm across her shoulders.

“What have you been doing for the last two weeks, Dele?” he asked.

She braved it for a moment or two with an eye full of love and stubbornness, and murmured a phrase or two vaguely of Gen. Pinkney; but at length down went her head and out came the truth and tears.

“I couldn’t get any pupils,” she confessed. “And I couldn’t bear to have you give up your lessons; and I got a place ironing shirts in that big Twentyfourth street laundry. And I think I did very well to make up both General Pinkney and Clementina, don’t you, Joe? And when a girl in the laundry set down a hot iron on my hand this afternoon I was all the way home making up that story about the Welsh rabbit. You’re not angry, are you, Joe? And if I hadn’t got the work you mightn’t have sold your sketches to that man from Peoria.

“He wasn’t from Peoria,” said Joe, slowly.

“Well, it doesn’t matter where he was from. How clever you are, Joe –and–kiss me, Joe–and what made you ever suspect that I wasn’t giving music lessons to Clementina?”