I get ready."

"Don't make it as long a proceeding as in the old days, then," he
said, as he stood by the table and carelessly turned over the
sketches, and she smiled a little bitterly as she promised to hurry,
realizing how little she had to select from as compared to the days
when the choice from many gowns demanded due consideration. A flood of
recollections came to her as she made her hasty toilet, and she
appreciated, from the cheer and life which Tom Livingston's brief
presence had brought into the studio, how terribly lonely her life had
been for the past few months. Before that there had been the
companionship of her fellow students in the art school, many of the
women struggling along like herself, living on the bare necessities of
life and oftentimes knowing what it meant to lack for them, but
stimulated and kept at their work by the hope of ultimate success in
their painting.

The small glass told her that her face was still very attractive,
although it had lost much of the girlish prettiness it possessed in
the days when Tom had known and loved her; but then--thank
Heaven!--she had never cared for such things, and all she wanted was
success in her chosen profession, the one thing which she loved in
life.

And Tom, on the other side of the door, was also thinking of her
career and the visible results of her work since he had seen her; the
small, cheap studio in the dilapidated old house and the lack of
comfort in her mode of living, and he contrasted it with the home he
had known her in and the things he could have surrounded her with, had
she accepted his offer when the crash came which threw her on her own
resources. She had elected to remain independent, to devote what
little money had been saved from the wreck of her fortunes to pursuing
her studies in painting; encouraged in her decision by the praise
which her amateurish efforts had gained from sympathetic friends. But
while the studies of the daughter of John Thornton, one of the most
influential men of the city where they lived, might be praised by the
good-natured reporters of the home papers at local exhibitions, the
works of Elizabeth Thornton, of whose parentage and social position
the critics neither knew nor cared, were judged on their merits when
she asked that they be taken seriously, and they were found sadly
wanting.

Tom could imagine the girl's latter history from what he knew of the
artists' colony in New York; the years in the art