"Thank you," he said; "you at least understand the art of saying nice things. Though that," he added, with his warmest smile, "is perhaps only natural in one who must have had so many nice things said to her."
She laughed, her ready, girlish laugh, which always seemed to him so young; and they climbed the crooked stairs of Studio Building, their breath hardly being any longer sufficient for much speech.
"I'm going to take you to Arthur Fenton's first," Rangely observed, as they paused to rest on one of the landings. "These stairs are awful. I wonder how he gets his elderly sitters up here."
Miss Merrivale seated herself upon a bench benevolently placed on the landing.
"They sit down here, of course," she responded.
"This is a sort of life-saving station," he remarked, seating himself beside her.
"Oh, Mr. Rangely, how awfully funny you are."
"It's my trade; I have to be to earn my living. Now you and I are the only survivors from a wreck."
"Alone on a desert island?"
"Life-saving stations are not generally on desert islands; but I hope you wouldn't mind so very much if it were."