Page:Elizabeth's Pretenders.djvu/68

Rh something absurd in this big superfine gentleman, with his healthy appetite, and his supreme indifference to the outer world, craving a girl's pity. But his listener was young, and she was not cold.

"I should pity—if I believed you. But somehow I—I really can't!"

"What can I do to make you? It is very hard. I never was more serious in all my life. I know I've been an ass. I know every one thinks me a bad lot. But, with your help, what a different man I should be! What a different life I should lead!"

Elizabeth gave a little strained laugh. She was resolved not to take her sitter seriously.

"The idea of a girl of my age helping a man of yours, who—who knows the world as you do! What nonsense!"

"You think so, just because you are so young, and know nothing of—of—things. No battered woman of the world could do for me what you could do, with your freshness—and—and all that, you know."

"Please turn a little more away. And your breastplate has slipped down—that's it. You really must not talk so much. Colonel Wybrowe. You lose the pose, and I can't paint if you do. Now, just a quarter of an hour more, and then I'll let you off for to-day."

Some such dialogue as this, with variations, was repeated every morning that week. The Wargrave ladies and Miss Palliser sniffed. It was a very odd proceeding— very unconventional, indeed—for a girl to be shut up alone with a man, and such a man as Colonel Wybrowe, for an hour and a half every morning, while she painted his portrait. She had said, to be sure, after the first