'What is the matter?' he exclaimed as soon as she joined him. 'You look as white as a ghost; you are over-tired, I suspect: had you not better get to sleep as soon as you can?' he inquired with concern, as he noticed that she was suffering from an amount of nervous exhaustion that alarmed him.
'It is nothing,' she returned: 'the journey was fatiguing;' and then her eye stole round the room with suppressed interest.
'Is that the pretty girl you wanted me to admire, Fred, just now when I was too hungry to oblige you?'
'Yes. Is she not a picture? What I should call a "stunner!"'
'When shall I ever knock the school-boy out of you, Fred?' she cried, laughing. 'You are a long way off from that refined phraseology I am labouring to inculcate. But you are right in this case. It is a beautiful picture, of what I should call a detestable character. She is, as you remark, a "stunner." There is not the least soul in her face; nothing but proud self-consciousness, as if she were saying: "I am a beauty, and I know it." Poor thing! she is to be pitied, if that is a true picture, and it looks as if it were.'
'How is she to be pitied? I don't see that at all.'
'Because you can't see yet, Fred, from your brief study of her face, that a girl like that may learn to feel at some time or another; and when she does, the lesson is generally such a painful one that few have the courage to rise above it. The artist who drew her was in no lenient mood; he could detect nothing in her but the stern facts which possibly made him suffer,' she added in an undertone, accompanied by a long-drawn sigh.—'I wish we had a book to read; try the bookcase; it may be unlocked.'
He did as she bade him; and shook his head negatively as he went first to the bookcase and then to the piano.
'"The gentleman," as our landlady calls him, is a cautious man evidently,' said Mrs Arlington. 'Well, we must not find fault with him, for his amiability towards his landlady has secured us a night's repose. I wonder if he is the artist of these pictures? I am ashamed of my curiosity, but I have a wish to know. Could you be diplomatic, Fred, and find out for me?'
'Why not ask the landlady straight out?'