“I don’t suppose every writing fellow’s like him,” Mr. Gustard went on. “And, anyway, the girl was a saucy hussy.”
“Samuel! That will do, I said.”
“Well, so she was,” Mr. Gustard continued, defiantly. “Didn’t she used to powder her face with your Borwick’s?”
“I’ll trouble you not to spit crumbs all over my clean cloth,” said Mrs. Gustard, “making the whole place look like a bird-cage!”
Mr. Gustard winked at Sylvia and was silent. She for her part had already begun to weave round Arthur Madden a veil of romance, when the practical side of her suddenly roused itself to a sense of what was going on and admonished her to leave off dreaming and attend to her cat.
Up-stairs in her bedroom, she opened her window and looked out at the faint drizzle of rain which was just enough to mellow the leafy autumnal scents and diffuse the golden beams of the lamps along the Heath. There was the sound of another window’s being opened on a line with hers; presently a head and shoulders scarcely definable in the darkness leaned out, whistling an old French air that was familiar to her from earliest childhood, the words of which had long ago been forgotten. She could not help whistling the air in unison; and after a moment’s silence a voice from the head and shoulders asked who it was.
“A girl,” Sylvia said.
“Anybody could tell that,” the voice commented, a little scornfully. “Because the noise is all woolly.”
“It’s not,” Sylvia contradicted, indignantly. “Perhaps you’ll say I’m out of tune? I know quite well who you are. You’re Arthur Madden, the boy next door.”
“But who are you?”