Notwithstanding her former reluctance Jill eventually undertook the commission for Mr Markham's portrait, though some time elapsed before she started on the work, Markham, himself, being out of town staying as a guest at a house where Evie Bolton was also visiting, a circumstance that filled St. John with pleasurable anticipation, though Jill, less sanguine as to the result, was more inclined to foresee troubles ahead, and looked forward with no great joy to their friend's return. Yet his manner, when he did put in an appearance, conveyed absolutely no impression; as St. John afterwards informed his wife he believed that Markham had funked it. "When shall we have the first sitting, Mrs St. John?" he exclaimed after the usual greetings were over. "I am quite anxious to begin." "Why not fix Monday?" suggested St. John amicably. "Monday!" cried Jill. "It's washing day. How can you be so inconsiderate?" "Oh, ah! washing day! I forgot. The atmosphere is composed of soap-suds, and we have cold meat. Not Monday, my dear boy; it is the most ungodly day of the week." "Tuesday would do," said Jill, "if that suits, and I think three o'clock would be the most convenient hour for me. The light, of course, is best in the mornings, but I am always busy then." "Any time will suit me," Markham answered promptly, "and any day." "Ah," said Jill with a little smile, "Jack was like that once. Why don't you get something to do?" "Because it isn't necessary." "But independence is such a grand thing," she persisted. "Exactly. I inherited it, and I like it best that way." Jill laughed. "We can't all be workers, I suppose," she said, "yet I fancy if I had been given my choice I should have chosen that kind of independence. Work is necessary to me." "From a selfish point of view I am glad that it is; otherwise you wouldn't paint portraits." "What makes you fancy that?" she asked. "No one who paints as you do would undertake portraits if they could avoid it. I know a man who has always one canvas at least in the academy, but he can't afford to paint pictures now; they don't sell; so he does portraits." Jill sighed. "I am sorry for that man," she said, "his life must be a disappointment. The people who want to be painted are generally so impossible." "My dear girl," remonstrated St. John, "considering the circumstances that is one of the things better left unsaid." "I am speaking from the artistic sense," she replied; "besides I said `generally.'" "I quite understand," interposed Markham laughing, "and entirely agree with you. But that won't interfere with the sitting on Tuesday, eh?" "I hope not," she answered gravely; "I should be doubly sorry now if you didn't come." "There is no fear of that," he said. "I enjoy seeing myself reproduced. It is so often an improvement, you know, yet one invariably flatters oneself that it is as one habitually looks." "We haven't done much to foster your conceit so far," she observed.