It was Cordelia who had finally persuaded him to undertake the picture, laughing all seriousness out of its rigid secrecy and holding it up to him as merely the passing whim of a very wealthy and very idle woman. It was she, too, who suggested a plan which he ultimately carried out--that the check he received in payment for his work be handed over to the chronically depleted funds of that East Side Convalescent Home of which he was a trustee.
Mrs. Spaulding, in turn, was not ungrateful for what she considered Cordelia's good offices in this case. She even confessed to her young ward the timid fear that a great artist like Repellier, reproducing on his canvas feature by feature the very face in which a vast but heroically hidden passion burned, might some day read the soul of the picture, where the soul of the woman had passed unnoticed. Cordelia agreed that such cases were not unknown, but honorably kept her own counsel in the matter and even bravely fought down within herself the last inner voice of flippancy.
When Repellier called that afternoon he found Cordelia down in the Spauldings' commodious kitchen, a cook and two busy maids about her.
"I had to call you down, it smells so fine," she cried happily, thrusting before his astonished nose a pan of sizzling English pheasant, which, after a long and tiring hunt throughout the city, she confided to him, she had found somewhere in cold storage.
"How domestic we are, and how charming we look!" said Repellier in reply, noting her bright eyes and flushed face.
"But," he asked, "what does it all mean?"
She told him of Hartley's change of apartments--it was the thought of relating these circumstances to Repellier more than to any one else that had troubled her for days--and how Mrs. Spaulding and she had promised to give him a little house-warming.
"And so we're going to give him a dinner, a most wonderful dinner!" she cried. "And I'm doing it all by myself!"
Repellier glanced interrogatively at the three busy servants.
"Of course I have to have a little help, but that's a secret. Our women at home--in the South--aren't taught to do this sort of thing, you know. Help, with us, is so easy to get, most of us never learn things. When I was a girl in Kentucky, I don't believe I ever went into a kitchen more than once a month. And now I've just discovered the fascination of the fryingpan."