"To-morrow," said Frank, without stopping rowing, "and the part that is important will be done to-night. Don't come into the studio, please, till it is too dark to paint. I can't paint with you there."
Margery felt a little hurt in her mind. She had meant to sit with him, as he had asked her to that morning. However, it was best to let him have his way, and she said no more.
It was scarcely half an hour after they had left the creek that they came opposite the little iron staircase leading down to the rocks. The tide was out, and Frank beached the boat on the shingle at the bottom of the rocks, jumped out, and drew it in. His pale face was flushed and dripping with sweat.
"You'd better change before you begin work," said Margery, as he helped her out, "or you'll catch cold."
Frank burst out with a grating, unnatural laugh.
"Change! I should think I am going to change! I wonder if you'll like the change!"
He walked on in front of her, and when he reached the terrace broke into a run. Margery heard the door of the studio bang behind him.
CHAPTER IX
Margery followed Frank more slowly up to the house. She had won her point; she had refused in the face of all her own inclinations and his feelings to tell him to leave the picture unfinished or to destroy it, and having succeeded in that for which she had been so intensely anxious, the reaction followed. Left to herself, she wondered if she had been right; whether she were wise to trust to reason rather than instinct; whether she had not perhaps in some dim, uncomprehended way put Frank in a position of terrible danger. But where or what, in the name of all that is rational, could the danger be? Yet there rose up before her, as if in answer to her question, the remembrance of Frank's face while he was painting. Could she account for that rationally? She was bound to confess she could not.