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 hand; diamonds glittered on its orbit. “So you cannot evade it, Mr. Gordon. You must come.”

Her hand poised above his arm, pouncing. He eluded it brusquely. “Excuse me.” Mr. Talliaferro avoided his sudden movement just in time, and the niece said wickedly:

“There’s a shirt behind the door, if that’s what you are looking for. You won’t need a tie, with that beard.”

He picked her up by the elbows, as you would a high narrow table, and set her aside. Then his tall controlled body filled and emptied the door and disappeared in the darkness of the hallway. The niece gazed after him. Mrs. Maurier stared at the door, then to Mr. Talliaferro in quiet amazement. “What in the world—” Her hands clashed vainly among her various festooned belongings. “Where is he going?” she said at last.

The niece said suddenly: “I like him.” She too gazed at the door through which, passing, he seemed to have emptied the room. “I bet he doesn’t come back,” she remarked.

Her aunt shrieked. “Doesn’t come back?”

“Well, I wouldn’t, if I were him.” She returned to the marble, stroking it with slow desire. Mrs. Maurier gazed helplessly at Mr. Talliaferro.

“Where—” she began.

“I’ll go see,” he offered, breaking his own trance. The two women regarded his vanishing neat back.

“Never in my life—Patricia, what did you mean by being so rude to him? Of course he is offended. Don’t you know how sensitive artists are? After I have worked so hard to cultivate him, too!”

“Nonsense. It’ll do him good. He thinks just a little too well of himself as it is.”

“But to insult the man in his own house. I can’t understand you young people at all. Why, if I’d said a thing like