Ramonti, with his still youthful face, his dark eyebrows, his short,
pointed, foreign, brown beard, his distinguished head of gray hair, and
his artist's temperament--revealed in his light, gay and sympathetic
manner--was a welcome tenant in the old house near Abingdon Square.
Helen lived on the floor above the store. The architecture of it was
singular and quaint. The hall was large and almost square. Up one side
of it, and then across the end of it ascended an open stairway to the
floor above. This hall space she had furnished as a sitting room and
office combined. There she kept her desk and wrote her business letters;
and there she sat of evenings by a warm fire and a bright red light and
sewed or read. Ramonti found the atmosphere so agreeable that he spent
much time there, describing to Mrs. Barry the wonders of Paris, where he
had studied with a particularly notorious and noisy fiddler.
Next comes lodger No. 2, a handsome, melancholy man in the early 40's,
with a brown, mysterious beard, and strangely pleading, haunting eyes.
He, too, found the society of Helen a desirable thing. With the eyes of
Romeo and Othello's tongue, he charmed her with tales of distant climes
and wooed her by respectful innuendo.
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