Page:Arthur Stringer - Twin Tales.djvu/96



in," said Teddie, rather shakily.

The bronze Moorish knocker on her studio-door had sounded ominously through the quietness, and even that second wind of courage which had come to her at the eleventh hour seemed to vanish before a sudden and rather breathless sense of impending culmination, not unlike that which once thrilled her childish body when an asbestos stage-curtain rolled up.

For thirty tense minutes, indeed, Teddie had been doing her best to work on a sketch of the Macauley Mission by Moonlight, slightly bewildered by the discovery that an ineradicable quaver in her fingers was giving uninvited Childe-Hassan vibrations to her lines. And now she had no need to 86