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 "Gush? I never gush!" roared the big man indignantly. "I have come for this little girl—for Pollyooly."

"You won't get her," said the Honorable John Ruffin with curt decision.

"I don't want her," said the big man. "At least I don't want to take her away from you. I want her to sit to me. I'm illustrating a set of fairy stories; and I must have her. She must sit for me. She's the one model in London—in England—in the world."

His voice rose to a bellow beside which the most wrathful trumpeting of Mr. Gedge-Tomkins would have sounded but as the cooing of a dove.

"An artist's model?" said the Honorable John Ruffin looking at Pollyooly with a pained air. "I once obliged a friend by sitting as model for a Roman patrician watching a gladiatorial show—a disreputable occupation—and I found it uncommonly dull and stiffening."

"Please, sir: it's a shilling an hour," said Pollyooly anxiously.

"Wealth—wealth beyond the dreams of avarice,"