Page:Arthur Stringer - Twin Tales.djvu/284

274 She raised ardent eyes at that, flushing happily as she looked up into his troubled face. For his thoughts, even as he spoke, had gone pioneering off into the uncertain future. And he turned her jealously away from the glow of the canvas.

"It mustn't take you away from me," he cried out, with a parade of self-pity.

She smiled surrenderingly, at that, and still again looked up into his eyes with a gaze so shot through with incongruously mingled hunger and gratitude that he turned sharply and took her in his arms.

She lay there passively, with her eyes half closed again. And he studied her, satisfied with the silence and her nearness.

He was still studying her when the sharp clangor of a bell sounded from below stairs. She drew away from him with a stricken light in her eyes.

The bell sounded again, more authoritatively, more angrily.

"That's Aunt Georgina," she said, with a look of childishness creeping back into her face. "She keeps that bell beside her bed. It means she wants me."