"It is not possible to be too good—to you!" said Saxham curtly. He would not see the outstretched hand. She drew it back, and faltered:
"You give me everything——"
"You have given me what I most wanted in the world!" he lied bravely.
"But"—she rose and stood beside him on the hearthrug, tall, and fair, and slender, and oh! most seductively, maddeningly sweet to his adoring thought—"but you take nothing for yourself. That bedroom of yours at the top of the house is wretchedly bare and comfortless; and then, those absurd pictures!"
She laughed ruefully, recalling the row of pictorially-illustrated nursery rhymes that adorned the brown-paper dado of Saxham's third-floor bedroom, the previous tenant having been a family man.
"—Little Miss Muffet and Georgy Porgy; the Four-and-Twenty Blackbirds, and the Cow that jumped over the Moon. How can you endure them?"
She looked at him, and was startled by the set grimness of his face and the thunderous lowering of the black smudge of eyebrow. He said:
"You went to my room to-day. Why?"
She crimsoned, and stammered:
"It was this morning, after you had gone out. I—it struck me that your linen ought to be overlooked and put to rights from time to time. How did you know?"