His wife was trembling with a kind of sacred terror. She had been afraid to pray for light for him, and here he was joyfully casting his whole past upon the pyre!
"Is there nothing left?" she faltered.
"Nothing left? There's everything!" he exulted. "Why, here I am, not much over forty, and I've found out already--already!" He stood up and began to move excitedly about the room. "My God! Suppose I'd never known! Suppose I'd gone on painting things like that forever! Why, I feel like those chaps at revivalist meetings when they get up and say they're saved! Won't somebody please start a hymn?"
Claudia, with a tremulous joy, was letting herself go on the strong current of his emotion; but it had not yet carried her beyond her depth, and suddenly she felt hard ground underfoot.
"Mrs. Davant--" she exclaimed.
He stared, as though suddenly recalled from a long distance.
"Mrs. Davant?"
"We were to have met her--this afternoon--now--"
"At the gallery? Oh, that's all right. I put a stop to that; I went to see her after I left you; I explained it all to her."
"All?"
"I told her I was going to begin all over again."
Claudia's heart gave a forward bound and then sank back hopelessly.
"But the panels--?"
"That's all right too. I told her about the panels," he reassured her.
"You told her--?"
"That I can't paint them now. She doesn't understand, of course; but she's the best little woman and she trusts me."
She could have wept for joy at his exquisite obtuseness. "But that isn't all," she wailed. "It doesn't matter how much you've explained to her. It doesn't do away with the fact that we're living on those panels!"
"Living on them?"
"On the money that she paid you to paint them. Isn't that what brought us here? And--if you mean to do as you say--to begin all over again--how in the world are we ever to pay her back?"
Her husband turned on her an inspired eye.
"There's only one way that I know of," he imperturbably declared; "and that's to stay out here till I learn how to paint them."
The Recovery Page 3