Page:The Outcry (London, Methuen & Co., 1911).djvu/63

Rh without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. "I haven't forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion."

"Bleak do you call it?" she laughed. "Why I found it, rather, tropical—'lush.' My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City."

"Then you made it doubtless bleak for him, let us say. I couldn't let you alone, I remember, about this—it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon." "This" obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye—and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke—characteristically, you would have been sure into a great free gaiety of recognition.

"Oh, we've nothing particular in the hall," Lady Grace amiably objected.

"Nothing, I see, but Claudes and Cuyps! I'm an ogre," he said "before a new and rare feast!"

She happily took up his figure. "Then