Page:The Yellow Book - 13.djvu/192

174 turned at the door and looked at him, was almost vacant in its innocence. He followed her hastily, and opened the door for her.

"You'd better wait," he said, involuntarily. "You'll catch cold or something out there."

She flashed a mocking look up in his face.

"Don't you think," she observed, demurely, "that that is one of the things about which one does not want suggestions from a man?"

Ten minutes later, she was accepting a torrent of apologies from Tom Hallaford with a queenly forgiveness that she knew by experience to be the most effective weapon at her command.

"If you weren't such an awful brick you'd never sit to me again," he avowed, humbly. "To drag you all this way, and then! Wasn't it beastly cold too?"

"It was cold," Anna admitted, gently. "But I didn't mind much."

And when he began afresh to abase himself, and made the confusing statement that he ought to be shot and was hanged, she felt he had suffered sufficiently, and she interrupted him by a true account of how she had spent the last half-hour.

"Well, I'm bothered! " he said. "Of course, Askett thought you were a model, a paid model, don't you see; and he thought it was just cheek of you to say his studio was dirty and all that. So it would have been rather, don t you know, if you'd been an ordinary model; they want jumping on sometimes. I say, Miss Angell," he added, chuckling, "what larks if Askett comes in when you've gone, and asks me for your address! Ten to one he does. What shall I say?"

"I don't fancy," said Anna, quietly, "that he will want to know."

Rh