Hartley looked round at Repellier, missing from the other's voice some note of enthusiasm which he had expected to be there. The older man's succeeding question, however, bridging as it apparently did some disrupted line of thought, adequately accounted for his judicial coldness of tone. "Are you getting broken in to work over here, Hartley--to good, hard work?" The younger man smiled. With him Euterpe and Eros, obviously, must not house together. "Jolly well broken in," was all he answered. "Work is our eternal redemption," Repellier said, with his hand on the younger man's shoulder. Then he sighed wearily. "But to a good many of us Americans a life of hurry, I guess, has become the only life of ease." CHAPTER III AN INTERLUDE OF ENLIGHTENMENT The lute forgetful of its note; The wing remembering not to fly In some sweet flight's mad ecstasy; The heart that failed to carve the form Since once the musing soul grew warm With love for her who sat for him Of too alluring moonbeam limb. JOHN HARTLEY, "The Lost Voice." "The defeated heart," sighed the woman in black, "has the habit of burying its own dead!"--"The Silver Poppy." For one virtue alone Cordelia Vaughan was looked on as a rare acquisition by Mrs. Alfred Spaulding. That virtue was her young ward's punctilious attention to all those social duties with regard to which she herself was prone to be deplorably careless. With the accession of Cordelia, therefore, she reveled in a vicarious ceremoniousness that wiped out many discomforting memories, ranging all the way from forgotten dinners to neglected dentist's engagements. It was but a little after eleven, on the morning following Repellier's birthday gathering, when Cordelia Vaughan alighted from the Spauldings' brougham and once more climbed the long stairs to the old artist's studio. Both she and Mrs. Spaulding had begged to come and help Repellier "clear up." Mrs. Spaulding, however, no longer dazzled by the glow that radiated, to her eyes, from the brow of that great artist, found in the depths of a soft pillow and a darkened room that the spirit was willing but the flesh lamentably weak. She told Cordelia to run along by herself; she had a headache to sleep off. And as Cordelia mounted lightly to the upper regions of Repellier's workrooms she felt in no way sorry for the promise. Some rudimentary simplicity in her character could always blithely sweep away the cobwebs of either propriety or impropriety--cobwebs so potentially tantalizing to one less ingenuous. Her late hours, too, seemed to have left no depression of spirits, no reaction of _ennui_, and she floated in before Repellier bright, buoyant, smiling, like a breath of the open morning itself, a confusion of mellow autumnal colors in her wine-colored gown and hat of roses and mottled leaves.