Odd looked at his watch; it was almost five. If Hilda had kept to her days he should probably find her in the Rue d'Assas, and, with the angriest feelings for himself and for the whole Archinard family, Hilda excepted, he was driven there through a sudden shower that scudded in fretful clouds across the blue above. He was none too soon, for he caught sight of Hilda half-way up the street as they turned the corner. The sight of him, as he jumped out of the cab and waylaid her, half dazed her evidently. "You? I can hardly believe it!" she gasped, smiling, but in a voice that plainly showed over-wrought mental and physical conditions. She was wofully white and thin; the hollowed line of her cheek gave to her lips a prominence pathetically, heartrendingly childlike; her clothes had reached a pitch of shabbiness that could hardly claim gentility; the slits in her umbrella and the battered shapelessness of her miserable little hat symbolized a biting poverty. "Hilda! Hilda!" was all Odd found to say as he put her into the cab. He was aghast. "I _am_ glad to see you," she said, and her voice had a forced gayety over its real weakness; "I haven't seen any of my people for so long, except mamma. An illness seems to put years between things, doesn't it? Poor mamma has been so really ill. It has troubled me horribly, for I could not tell whether it were grave enough to bring back papa and Katherine; but Katherine is coming. I expected her a day or two ago, and mamma is much, _much_ better. As for papa, the last time I heard from him he was in Greece and going on to Constantinople. I am glad now that he hasn't been needlessly frightened, for he will get all my last letters together, and will hear that she is almost well again. And you are here! And Kathy coming! I feel that all my clouds are breaking." Odd could trust his voice now; her courage, strung as he felt it to be over depths of dreadful suffering, nerved him to a greater self-control. "If I had known I would have come sooner," he said; "you would have let me help you, wouldn't you?" "I am afraid you couldn't have _helped_ me. That is the worst of illness, one can only wait; but you would have cheered me up." "My poor child!" Odd inwardly cursed himself. "If I had known! What have you been doing to yourself, Hilda? You look--" "Fagged, don't I? It is the anxiety; I have given up half my work since you left; my pictures are accepted at the Champs de Mars. We'll all go to the _vernissage_ together. And, as they were done, I let Miss Latimer have the studio for the whole day. That left me my mornings free for mamma." "Taylor helped you, I suppose?"