“Edmund Rivers.”
“Yes, Edmund Rivers, the famous landscape-painter—you see I know all about your fame—and I have a letter of yours in my pocket.”
As a matter of fact, she had not, she was thinking of the muslin dress she had worn days ago, into whose pocket she had thrust the autograph letter Egidia had given her. The dress was in her bag, lying at the Porter’s lodge, a mile away. Still it sounded better. The artist luckily did not ask to see the letter, but looked puzzled, and a little displeased.
“I collect autographs!” she went on hastily, “and Miss Giles—Egidia, you know, the famous novelist—gave it to me. She said she was a relation of yours. She is a great friend of mine, too. I am on my way to stay with her.”
“Oh, indeed!” he said, stiffly.
“But I must ask you,” she went on, clasping her hands together, “not to mention my name to her when you write, or even to say that you have seen me. Please promise?”
“But, my dear madam, I don’t know your name, and am never likely to.”
“Oh, yes; but indeed you must know my name,” she said simply, “Miss Frick.”
It was a pseudonym adopted on the spur of the moment; she had known a German governess of the name. Once fairly launched in fiction she went on easily.
“I am the daughter of a country clergyman, and he’s very poor—we are seven—and we all earn our bread. It is a very strange story. My father married again, an odious woman none of us could live with. I did type-writing—that is how I weakened my eyes—and then I broke down, and I had to go into the country for my health.”