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 the Bond Street Gallery. Wonderful line. A great sense of mass effect."

"You can't tell me," said June, "there's beauty in a thing like that—in that old Workhouse?"

"Duclaux would say so, with that dark cloud cutting across the gable. And that bend of the Canal in the foreground is not without value." He smiled his rare smile which never had looked so divine. But June was a little afraid of it now. She kept her eyes the other way.

"Canal," she said with brevity. "Not without value. I should say so. As we say at Blackhampton, 'where there's muck there's money.'"

She glanced at her wrist again. Another ten minutes credited now to Mr. Mitchell's account.

"Duclaux, I suppose, would see it this way." The queer fellow stepped back two paces, put up his hand to shade his eyes and adjust his vision to look at the Workhouse.

This was Pure Pottiness, the concentrated essence in tabloid form. However, Miss Babraham had already impressed upon June the deep truth that genius must be allowed a margin.

A little faint of heart she rang the bell of the gloomy and forbidding door. The summons was heeded, tardily and with reluctance, by its janitor, a surly male.

"Can we see Mrs. Stark?" asked June.

"Eh?" said the janitor. He must have been deaf indeed not to have heard the question in its cool clarity. June repeated it; whereon the keeper of the door looked her slowly up and down, turning over the name in his mind as he did so.