Page:Keeping the Peace.pdf/293

 and on the way they named a day—the next day but one, at five o'clock.

"I want to talk to you about a lot of things," she said. "A portrait of myself—if you would care for the commission—and your—well, your younger tenant."

Her eyes were fixed sharply upon his. And he knew at once that she knew about Anne. He lowered his voice.

"What about her?" he asked anxiously. "She's all right, isn't she?"

But Mrs. Ludlow only smiled, stepped nimbly into her carriage and said: "Home—Robbins."

Edward was beginning to wonder why he heard nothing of Alice Ruggles—she must know that he was in Westchester—and he wrote to her and received no answer. He determined, therefore—in spite of his promise to Anne—to call upon her at the earliest opportunity, but in the meanwhile the portrait of Mrs. Ludlow, for which she was to pay him five hundred dollars, occupied his mind to the exclusion of everything else.

He had called upon Mrs. Ludlow, and together they looked over all the dresses in her wardrobe. They had chosen the dress for her to be painted in, and they decided that she should be painted behind a tea table with a handsome service of Georgian silver-fluted column behind her and in