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CHAPTER VI.

LOOK here, I’m getting tired of this sitting still business. I vote we shut up shop and have the money returned at the doors—don’t you?”

“Oh, pray don’t move, Princess! Don’t yawn, I do beg of you! You will spoil the whole pose, and I was getting you in so splendidly this time.”

In a vine-trellised corner of her wide veranda Mrs. Austin was gracefully “composed” with a high-backed Old English chair, a tapestry curtain, and a gauzy mass of pale sea-green drapery twisted mysteriously round her shoulders and falling loosely over her bare arms. Campbell was standing by an easel rapidly sketching her profile in coloured chalks. He had already made a dozen attempts, but none of them were quite satisfactory. There was Mrs. Austin as a Newhaven fishwife, half-length; head and shoulders in Greek costume, time of Iphigenia; Gains-

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