I was looking at Nelly's picture, taken in cap and gown just before she graduated last June. My Nelly! Nelly as she used to be before this strange thing happened; eager-eyed, thin with over-study and rapid growth. Nelly, whose bright face, swept by so many lights and shadows of expression, sensitive to so many shifting moods, I loved and yearned for. Nearly six months we'd been apart, but at last I had followed to New York to claim her. As I sat smiling at the dream pictures the dear face evoked, my brain was busy with thoughts of the new home we would together build. I'd hoard every penny, I planned; I'd walk to save car-fare, practice all economies-Wasn't that a face at her window?
I reached the top landing again, three steps at a time; but the voice that said "Come!" was not Helen's and the figure that turned from pulling at the shades was short and rolypoly and crowned by flaming red hair.
"Miss Winship?" said the voice, as its owner seated herself at a big table. "Can't imagine what's, keeping her. Are you the John Burke I've heard so much about? And--perhaps Helen has written to you of Kitty Reid?"
Without waiting for a reply, she bent over the table, scratching with a knife at a sheet of bold drawings of bears.
"You won't mind my keeping right on?" she queried briskly, lifting a rosy, freckled face. "This is the animal page of the Sunday Star and Cadge is in a hurry for it, to do the obbligato."
I suppose I must have looked the puzzlement I felt, for she added hastily:-"The text, you know; a little cool rill of it to trickle down through the page like a fine, thin strain of music that--that helps out the song--tee- e-e-um; tee-e-e-um--" She lifted her arm, sawing with a long ruler at a violin of air,--"but you don't have to listen unless you wish--to the obbligato, you know."
"Doesn't the writer think the pictures the unobtrusive embroidery of the violin, and the writing the magic melody one cannot choose but hear?"
I thought that rather neat for my first day in New York, but the shrewd blue eyes opened wide at the heresy.
"Why, no; of course Cadge knows it's the pictures that count; everybody knows that."
A writing-table jutted into the room from a second window, backing against Miss Reid's. On its flap lay German volumes on biology and a little treatise in English about "Advanced Methods of Imbedding, Sectioning and Staining." The window ledge held a vase of willow and alder twigs, whose buds appeared to be swelling. Beside it was a glass of water in which seeds were sprouting on a floating island of cotton wool.