Ariel started to rise from her chair, her face gone wan and strange. But she sank down again. Her heart was beating leaden beats. How _could_ she know that this ring had belonged to the possessor of those hands, now dust, and how could she know that Grandam’s time to die had come! It may have been some glance toward the pictured hands, as Grandam slipped the ring from her finger and gave it to Ariel, unnoticed then but impressed somehow all the same on Ariel’s memory, which let her know to whom the ring belonged. But the conclusion that Grandam had given it to Ariel because she was now to die—that was unreasonable. Ariel clutched her napkin in tense fingers and tried to be reasonable.
Mrs. Weyman was saying, “But it’s all right, my dear. It’s only that I’ve never seen Grandam separated from her ring before. Since she gave it to you, she wants you to have it. It is only another sign of her affection....”
Schwankovsky, as well as Mrs. Weyman, had been startled by Ariel’s air of shock, and now the big man said soothingly, “Every one has affection for my Ariel. Of the deepest. Old Doctor Hazzard, did you know, is saving your studio in Bermuda for you? The more I offered him for it, the surer he became that you, my child, would have need for it in time. When I told him of the success of the exhibition and tried to show him that you were financially independent, now, he was not changed. By his will the studio is to become yours. He says, and perhaps truly, for he is wise in some ways, that man, that the paintings themselves are the things to make pilgrimages to, not the place where they were made. He says that the studio was a home first, and a studio second. I came away having accomplished nothing.”
Joan, at the foot of the table, shrugged and met Michael’s eyes with sympathetic humor. “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for one of these Philistines to comprehend the artist’s mind,” she put in. “Poor Michael! All your journey for nothing! A home before it was a studio! Lovely!”
“Oh, no. Not for nothing. And not ‘lovely’ either! I had a rather rich week, Joan. Enlightening. And Doctor Hazzard himself was well worth the trip. He is coming to visit me this fall. We have become friends. And if he is a Philistine, then a world of Philistines would be a Utopia.”