"I'm not afraid. If they ever do nab me, I've got a spiel about my poor old mother...."
"You haven't got a mother."
"Who said I had?... a spiel about my poor old mother that would draw tears from the Woolworth Building. Listen! 'Don't turn me over to the police, mister, I only did it for ma's sake. If you was out of work for weeks and starvin' and you had to sit and watch your old ma bendin' over the wash-tubs....'"
"Don't, Fanny, please! I can't bear it even though I know it's just a game. I.... Hello! Somebody at the front door. Probably only a model wanting to know if Mr. Finch has a job for her. You wait here, honey. I'll get rid of her and be back in half a minute."
4
More than twenty times that period had elapsed, however, before Frederick Mullett returned to the kitchen. He found his bride-to-be in a considerably less amiable mood than that in which he had left her. She was standing with folded arms, and the temperature of the room had gone down a number of degrees.
"Pretty girl?" she inquired frostily, as Mullett crossed the threshold.
"Eh?"
"You said you were going to send that model away in half a minute, and I've been waiting here nearer a quarter of an hour," said Fanny, verifying this statement by a glance at the wrist-watch, the absence of which from their stock was still an unsolved mystery to a prosperous firm of jewellers on Fifth Avenue.
Mullett clasped her in his arms. It was a matter of some difficulty, for she was not responsive, but he did it.