imney. The red-haired girl never consulted him
about anything.

On the other hand, she accepted his appearances without protest, and
watched him always. He discovered that the meals of the establishment
were irregular and fragmentary. They depended chiefly on tea, pickles,
and biscuit, as he had suspected from the beginning. The girls were
supposed to market week and week about, but they lived, with the help of
a charwoman, as casually as the young ravens. Maisie spent most of her
income on models, and the other girl revelled in apparatus as refined
as her work was rough. Armed with knowledge, dear-bought from the Docks,
Dick warned Maisie that the end of semi-starvation meant the crippling
of power to work, which was considerably worse than death.

Maisie took the warning, and gave more thought to what she ate and
drank. When his trouble returned upon him, as it generally did in the
long winter twilights, the remembrance of that little act of domestic
authority and his coercion with a hearth-brush of the smoky drawing-room
chimney stung Dick like a whip-lash.

He conceived that this memory would be the extreme of his sufferings,
till one Sunday, the red-haired girl announced that she would make a
study of Dick's head, and that he would be good enough to sit still,
and--quite as an afterthought--look at Maisie. He sat, because he could
not well refuse, and for the space of half an hour he reflected on all
the people in the past whom he had laid open for the purposes of his
own craft. He remembered Binat most distinctly,--that Binat who had once
been an artist and talked about degradation.

It was the merest monochrome roughing in of a head, but it presented the
dumb waiting, the longing, and, above all, the hopeless enslavement of
the man, in a spirit of bitter mockery.

'I'll buy it,' said Dick, promptly, 'at your own price.'

'My price is too high, but I dare say you'll be as grateful if----' The
wet sketch, fluttered from the girl's hand and fell into the ashes of
the studio stove. When she picked it up it was hopelessly smudged.

'Oh, it's all spoiled!' said Maisie. 'And I never saw it. Was it like?'

'Thank you,' said Dick under his breath to the red-haired girl, and he
removed himself swiftly.

'How that man hates me!' said the girl. 'And how he loves you, Maisie!'

'What nonsense? I knew Dick's very fond of me, but he had his work to
do, and I have mine.'

'Yes, he is fond of you, and I think he knows