Page:Arthur Stringer - Twin Tales.djvu/244

234 Again the girl shook her head.

"She has had to go to Weston to see a lawyer about a mortgage foreclosure—and she has always hated the pictures."

"Then why couldn't you show them to me?" he suggested.

"I don't think my aunt would approve of that."

"But in an emergency like this?" he contended.

"I wouldn't be allowed to," she said with an odd flattening of the voice. "Some of them are not" she broke off. Her shoulder movement was a half-ironic one. "Even my aunt objected to some of them. She was carrying one of the bigger canvases down to her bedroom when she slipped and fell."

"That was unfortunate," he perfunctorily exclaimed. His mind, for the moment, seemed to be on other things. It was his glance into the girl's face, where he sensed pennons of valor behind the bastions of silence, that brought his thoughts back to the present.

"But why to her bedroom?" he asked.