“‘That’s all right, guv’nor,’ cried the showman; ‘this is the sword ’ee wished ’ee ’ad.’”
The girl’s mimicry of the coster-showman’s speech was inimitable, and the two men laughed as much at her telling as at the tale itself.
George Carlyon got up from his seat, saying, “But I say, you two, do you mind if I leave you to amuse each other for an hour? I want, very much, to run down to the club. I’ll come back for you, Madge, or meet you somewhere.”
“Bless the boy!” she laughed. “Do you think I was reared in an incubator, or in your Mayfair? Haven’t you learned that, given a Yankee girl’s got dollars under her boots to wheel on, it ain’t much fuss for her to skate through this old country of yours, nor yet through Europe, come to that, even though she has no more languages under her tongue than good plain Duchess county American. I told the ‘boys’ that before I left home.”
George Carlyon laughed, as, accepting his release, he nodded to the pair and left the room.
It was a strangely new experience to Tom Hammond, to be left alone with a beautiful and charming woman like Madge Finisterre.
The picture she made, as she moved round the room looking at the framed paintings, all gifts from his artist friends, came to him as a kind of revelation. When he had met her that day in the Embankment hotel, he had been charmed with her beauty and her frank, open, unconventionality of manner. He had thought of her many times since—only that very day, a moment before her arrival,—thought of her as men think of a picture or a poem which has given them delight. But now he found her appealing to him.
She was a woman, a beautiful, attractive woman. She suggested sudden thoughts of how a woman, loved, and returning that love, might affect his life, his happiness.
Her physical grace and beauty, the exquisite fit of her costume, the perfect harmony of it—all this struck him now. But the woman in her appealed strongest to him.
“Awfully good, this sketch of street arabs!” she turned to say, as she stood before a clever bit of black-and-white drawing.