er. Her movements were being watched not only by
ourselves, but by her two children. Fortunately, they were beyond her,
their legs planted far apart, their hands behind them, so that I could
see without stint the magnificent pose of the woman's body. Her arms
hovered over the vessel, the left resting at times upon it, the other
selecting pieces of fuel from a box at her side. The line of her back
from hip to shoulder seemed incredibly straight and long. The cold wind
that was blowing gustily and which was the ostensible cause of her
preparations, pressed her thin dress to her form and showed with
sportive candour the fine modelling of bosom and limbs. Chiefly,
however, I was attracted by the superb disdain in the poise of the head.
It was a dark head, coiled heavily with black hair and set back in the
hollow of the shoulders. Her face may be called dark too, the black
eye-brows and olive skin being unrelieved by colour in the cheeks. Her
whole expression was, you might say, forbidding, and I was not surprised
when one of the boys received a push as he bent his head over the
brazier. There was such an electric quickness in the gesture, such a
dispassionate resumption of her former pose, that one involuntarily
conceded to her a fierce and peremptory disposition. One felt that such
a woman would listen with some impatience to complaints about predatory
fowls, that she would stand no nonsense from her children either,
that....

The same thought flashed through our minds simultaneously, and in strict
accordance with our differing temperaments Bill voiced it.

"I wonder if they don't get on," she said.

"I wonder," I assented.

The brazier full, Mrs. Carville rose, the handle in her hand. Pointing
to the box, she spoke to her children, who hastily removed it to a shed
at the bottom of the yard. She turned to enter the house, her large
black eyes swept our windows in a swift comprehensive glance of
suspicion and then she vanished.

I retired hastily to my desk, acutely conscious that we had been, well,
that we had been impolite! Bill went away without speaking, and for a
couple of hours I was absorbed in my work. Growing weary of the thing, I
took up my pipe and went upstairs to the studio.

"Just in time for tea," said Bill. "Have a cookie?"

The studio was in some disorder, and the atmosphere was heavy with the
odour of printer's ink. The etching press had been dragged out from the
wall, trays of water, bottles of be