a presence should grace
his attic.

"It's miles better," said Margaret. "But you still look puzzled. Isn't
your ingenuity equal to the task of guessing how I found you out?"

"I don't know, unless Diana's old sweetheart paid you a visit
yesterday," he answered smiling, as he spread the new rug under her
feet. "But he certainly said nothing to me about it this afternoon
when I saw him off."

"He was probably afraid to let you know he'd been weak enough to yield
to our blandishments. I had an idea you were living in a garret--the
garret always seems to put a sort of hall-mark on genius. It's a very
nice garret, too. I like mine better, though--it's a lump larger."

If the pure pleasure of being near her began to predominate, it was
certainly not unaccompanied by the pain that was always with him
because of his vain love for her; so that his entire feeling was a
rather mixed and undecided one. He could not quite abandon himself to
gladness at her coming, and perhaps the very unexpectedness of it
aided this emotional embarrassment.

"Have you been working much of late?" he asked, that being a natural
question to follow her reference to her studio. He was, indeed,
relieved that the conversation had got on so definite a tack and that
she had not alluded to his avoidance of her family or reproached him
for it.

"I'm just doing a little group of greyhounds. I'm going to exhibit
them at the Academy. It's such a bother and such fun, too! I've got
over the worst part now. The big mother and two little ones playing at
the side of her make twelve legs and three tails--quite a forest of
them. I had no end of trouble to get a good composition. But the chief
bother was with the models. The dog would never keep still, and I had
to keep on moving my wax figure just as it moved. Sometimes it would
turn upside down, and then I had to turn my work upside down as well.
Do you know what I should like to do, Morgan?"

"I don't, but I should like to."

"I wonder if you'd let me make a bust of you! I want to very much."

"Why?" he asked, without meaning that exactly, but only by way of
surprised exclamation.

"Well," she smiled, "I just want to. I could have an old bench brought
up here and a lot of clay. If you sat to me, say, for a couple of
hours every Sunday morning, you'd begin to recognise yourself after a
time."

He was powerless to refuse. With her speaking to him, he became as
passive as the clay she moulded. He knew her