Leavesley was one of those unhappy people who meet their pleasures and their troubles half-way. He was an imaginative man, moving in a most unimaginative world, and as a result he was always knocking his nose against the concrete. Needless to say, his forecasts were nearly always wrong. If he opened a letter thinking it contained a bill, it, ten to one, enclosed a theatre ticket or a cheque, and if he expected a cheque, fifty to one he received a bill.
This temperament, however, sometimes has its advantages, for he was sitting now quite contentedly painting and getting on with his picture, whilst Mr Verneede was sitting quite contentedly in the bar of the "Spotted Dog."
He was also smoking furiously with all the windows shut. To the artistic temperament at times comes moods, when it shuts all the windows, excluding noise and air, lights the foulest old pipe it can find, and, to use a good old public school term, "fugs."
Suddenly he stopped work, half-sprang to his feet, palette in one hand, pipe in the other. A footstep was on the landing, a girl's footstep—it was her!
The door opened, and his aunt stood before him.
Since the other night when Fanny had dined with them, Miss Hancock had been much exercised in her mind.
How on earth had Leavesley known of the affair? Had he referred to Fanny when he made that mysterious remark about his uncle and a girl, or was there another girl? She had an axiom that when a man once begins to make a fool of himself he doesn't know where to stop; she had also a strong dash of her nephew's imaginative temperament. Fanny had troubled her at first; seraglios were now rising in her mental landscape. She had an intuition that her brother had broken the ice as regards the other sex, and a dreadful fear that now he had broken the ice he was going to bathe.
"Whew!" said Miss Hancock, waving her parasol before her to dispel the clouds of smoke.
"Aunt!"
"For goodness sake, open the window. Open something—achu!—do you live in this atmosphere?"