“Know you better.” She looked him up and down through narrowed lids. “A little more round to the right, please. Talk to him, Oliver.” And she settled herself to work.
Justin chuckled. But Oliver, watching her curiously, noticing the business-like deftness of her preparations, turned, with a touch of discomfort, to Justin.
“I say—I didn’t know——” And then, in an undertone, “Is she really any good?”
Justin held out his plate.
“I always told you she was keen. Cut us another slice. I wish you were not quite so deaf,” for Oliver’s attention had strayed back again to Laura.
But Laura stood and watched them while her hand flashed and hesitated over her paper, with an air so impersonal in its very intentness that in some fashion it removed her from them, till at last they forgot her as one forgets the caged presence of some bright-eyed, all-attentive bird. They sat chatting together over their sandwiches, and, what with the sunshine and the tobacco smoke and the midday stillness, grew at last so drowsy that Justin, for one, jumped when Laura, with a despairing gesture that sent the charcoal flying, abandoned her easel and came to them across the room.
“Well?” Oliver roused himself.
Laura pushed aside her hair with the back of her blackened hand. She had managed in the last half-hour to make herself more dishevelled than Oliver had ever seen her. She was flushed to the eyes and she looked dead tired. But he perceived that whatever spirit had possessed her was departed.
She answered, not him but Justin’s eyes, with a shrug, half deprecating, half defiant.
“I’ve done. I’m afraid I’ve messed up the floor, Oliver. It’s no good, of course. Of course I can’t. Justin, I’m a conceited ass. Any lunch left? I’m starving. It’s—it’s an awfully tiring day.” She flung herself into a chair. “Oliver, get me a glass.”