AN April sky smiled over Paris on the day of Odd’s return. A rather prolonged tour had tanned his face, and completely cured his lungs.

He expected to find Katherine already in Paris; her last letters had announced her departure from a Surrey country house, and had implied some anxiety in regard to a prolonged illness of Mrs. Archinard’s. Katherine had written him very soon after their parting, that the Captain had gone on a yachting trip in the Mediterranean, and that she knew that he had left Hilda with money, so Peter need not worry. Peter had seen to this matter before leaving Paris, and had approved of the Captain’s projected jaunt. He surmised that her father’s absence would lighten Hilda’s load, and hoped that the sum he placed in the Captain’s hands—on the understanding that most of it was to be given to Hilda—but from her father, would relieve her from the necessity for teaching. Peter called at the Rue Pierre Charron early in the afternoon, but the servant (neither Taylor nor Wilson, but a more hybrid-looking individual with unmistakable culinary traces upon her countenance) told him that Mademoiselle Archinard had not yet arrived. Madame still in bed “toujours souffrante,” and “Mademoiselle ‘Ilda”—Odd had hesitated uncomfortably before asking for her—was out. “Pas bien non plus, celle-là,” she volunteered, with a kindly French familiarity that still more strongly emphasized the contrast with Taylor and Wilson; “Elle s’éreinte, voyez-vous monsieur, la pauvre demoiselle.” With a sick sense of calamity and helplessness upon him, Odd asked at what hours she might be found. All the morning, it seemed “Il faut bien qu’elle soigne madame, et puis elle m’aide. Je suis seule et la besogne serait par trop lourde,” and Rosalie also volunteered the remark that “Madame est très, mais très exigeante, nuit et jour; pas moyen de dormir avec une damê comme celle-là.”

Odd looked at his watch; it was almost five. If Hilda had kept to her days he should probably find her in the Rue d’Assas, and, with the angriest feelings for himself and for the whole Archinard family, Hilda excepted, he was driven there through a sudden shower that scudded in fretful clouds across the blue above. He was none too soon, for he caught sight of Hilda half-way up the street as they turned the corner. The sight of him, as he jumped out of the cab and waylaid her, half dazed her evidently.

“You? I can hardly believe it!” she gasped, smiling, but in a voice that plainly showed over-wrought mental and physical conditions. She was wofully white and thin; the hollowed line of her cheek gave to her lips a prominence pathetically, heartrendingly childlike; her clothes had reached a pitch of shabbiness that could hardly claim gentility; the slits in her umbrella and the battered shapelessness of her miserable little hat symbolized a biting poverty.

“Hilda! Hilda!” was all Odd found to say as he put her into the cab. He was aghast.

“I am glad to see you,” she said, and her voice had a forced gayety over its real weakness; “I haven’t seen any of my people for so long, except mamma. An illness seems to put years between things, doesn’t it? Poor mamma has been so really ill. It has troubled me horribly, for I could not tell whether it were grave enough to bring back papa and Katherine; but Katherine is coming. I expected her a day or two ago, and mamma is much, much better. As for papa, the last time I heard from him he was in Greece and going on to Constantinople. I am glad now that he hasn’t been needlessly frightened, for he will get all my last letters together, and will hear that she is almost well again. And you are here! And Kathy coming! I feel that all my clouds are breaking.”

Odd could trust his voice now; her courage, strung as he felt it to be over depths of dreadful suffering, nerved him to a greater self-control.

“If I had known I would have come sooner,” he said; “you would have let me help you, wouldn’t you?”

“I am afraid you couldn’t have helped me. That is the worst of illness, one can only wait; but you would have cheered me up.”

“My poor child!” Odd inwardly cursed himself. “If I had known! What have you been doing to yourself, Hilda? You look—“

“Fagged, don’t I? It is the anxiety; I have given up half my work since you left; my pictures are accepted at the Champs de Mars. We’ll all go to the vernissage together. And, as they were done, I let Miss Latimer have the studio for the whole day. That left me my mornings free for mamma.”

“Taylor helped you, I suppose?”

“Taylor is with Katherine. She went before mamma was at all ill, and indeed mamma insisted that Katherine must have her maid. I was glad that she should go, for she has worked hard without a rest for so long, and, of course, travelling about as she has been doing, Katherine needed her.” There was an explanatory note in Hilda’s voice; indeed Odd’s silence, big with comment, gave it a touch of defiance. “It made double duty for Rosalie, but she is a good, willing creature, and has not minded.”

“And Wilson?”

“He went with papa. I don’t think papa could live without Wilson.”

“Oh, indeed. I begin to solve the problem of your ghastly little face. You have been housemaid, garde-malade, and bread-winner. Had you no money at all?” Hilda flushed—the quick flush of physical weakness.

“Yes, at first,” she replied; “papa gave me quite a lot before going, and that has paid part of the doctor’s bills, and my lessons brought in the usual amount.”

“Could you not have given up the lessons for the time being?”

“I know you think it dreadful in me to have left mamma for all those afternoons.” Her acceptation of a blame infinitely removed from his thoughts stupefied Odd. “And mamma has thought it heartless, most naturally. But Rosalie is trustworthy and kind. The doctor came three times a day and I can explain to you”—Hilda hesitated—“the money papa gave me went almost immediately—some unpaid bills.”

“What bills?” Odd spoke sternly.

“Why, we owe bills right and left!” said Hilda.

“But what bills were these?”

“There was the rent of the apartment for one thing; we should have had to go had that not been paid; and then, some tailors, a dressmaker; they threatened to seize the furniture.”

“Katherine’s dressmaker?”

“Yes; Katherine, I know, never dreamed that she would be so impatient; but I suppose, on hearing that Katherine had gone to England, the woman became frightened.” Peter controlled himself to silence. The very fulness of Hilda’s confidence showed the strain that had been put upon her. “And then,” she went on, as he did not speak, “some of the money had to go to Katherine in England. Poor Kathy! To be pinched like that! She wrote, that at one place it took her last shilling to tip the servants and get her railway ticket to Surrey.”

“Why did she not write to me? Considering all things—“

“Oh!” said Hilda—her tone needed no comment—“we have not quite come to that.” She added presently and gently, “I had money for her.”

Odd took her hand and kissed it; the glove was loose upon it.

“And now,” said Hilda, leaning forward and smiling at him, “you have heard me filer mon chapelet. Tell me what you have been doing.”

“My lazy wanderings in the sun would sound too grossly egotistic after your story.”

“Has my story sounded so dismal? I have been egotistic, then. I had hoped that perhaps you would write to me,” she added, and a delicately malicious little smile lit her face. Odd looked hard at her, with a half-dreamy stare.

“I thought of yo............