When she had seen them safely out, the padrona dropped softly into her big chair, and hid her face in her hands. Alice’s outfit, and the wedding, and all the year’s expenses, which she had thought safely provided for, and her little triumph in being free of the dealers for once,--they were all gone! It was not such a moving spectacle, perhaps, as if she had been a young girl weeping for her lover. But those two tears that forced themselves out, womanish, against her clasped hands, what concentrated pain was in them! They were more bitter than many a summer torrent out of younger eyes. And then she sprang to her feet, and snatched at her palette, and went to work with flaming cheeks and a headache, and all her old fire in her eyes. She had been listless enough before, but she was not listless now. When Nelly Rich, however, heard of this wonderful proceeding, their grand house became too hot to hold the unhappy pair. ‘Withdraw your commission! for what reason, in heaven’s name?’ cried Nelly, blazing at them in thunder and lightning. The girl was half crazy with shame and disgust. She brought her father almost to his knees before the day was over, and flew to London, post haste, by herself, in spite of everybody’s remonstrances, to make up the matter. ‘Papa had gone out of his senses, I suppose,’ she said, dissembling her fury, to Mrs. Severn. ‘Padrona mia, for the sake of old times, you will not mind? He is so sorry. They were both mad, I suppose.’ If Mrs. Severn had followed her first impulse, she would have held by the dealers, who were not liable to such madness; but she was her children’s mother, and had the bread and butter to think of, and was not able to afford such luxuries as revenge or pride. So that nobody was the worse for the patron’s ill-temper except himself; and two people were the better,--to wit, Nelly and Cinderella, the latter of whom had been undoubtedly languishing under the weight of Mrs. Severn’s heavy heart, until this violent pinch of apparent evil fortune came to sting her into life. As for Nelly, setting her foot into the studio did her good. The smell of the pigments, and the sight of the rubbish about,--all the sketches, and unused bits of canvas, and bursting portfolios, were balm to the impetuous but not ungenerous girl. ‘I don’t want to see Alice,’ she said; ‘it was sly of her not to tell me. No, I don’t want to see her; but she is very happy, I suppose;’ and it was not possible that this could be said without a certain bitterness, considering all that had come and gone.