He was also smoking furiously with all the windows shut. To the artistic temperament at times comes moods, when it shuts all the windows, excluding noise and air, lights the foulest old pipe it can find, and, to use a good old public school term, "fugs." Suddenly he stopped work, half-sprang to his feet, palette in one hand, pipe in the other. A footstep was on the landing, a girl's footstep--it was _her_! The door opened, and his aunt stood before him. Since the other night when Fanny had dined with them, Miss Hancock had been much exercised in her mind. How on earth had Leavesley known of the affair? Had he referred to Fanny when he made that mysterious remark about his uncle and a girl, or was there _another_ girl? She had an axiom that when a man once begins to make a fool of himself he doesn't know where to stop; she had also a strong dash of her nephew's imaginative temperament. Fanny had troubled her at first; seraglios were now rising in her mental landscape. She had an intuition that her brother had broken the ice as regards the other sex, and a dreadful fear that now he had broken the ice he was going to bathe. "Whew!" said Miss Hancock, waving her parasol before her to dispel the clouds of smoke. "Aunt!" "For goodness sake, open the window. Open something--achu!--do you _live_ in this atmosphere?" Leavesley opened wide the windows, tapped the ashes of his pipe out on a sill, and turned to his aunt, who had taken her seat in an uncomfortable manner on a most comfortable armchair. "This is an unexpected pleasure!" Miss Hancock made no reply. It was the first time she had been in the studio, the first time she had been in any studio. She noticed the dust and the litter. The place was, in fact, extraordinarily untidy, for Belinda, engaged just now in the fascination of a policeman, had scarcely time even for such ordinary household duties as making beds without turning the mattresses, and flinging eggs into frying pans full of hot grease. As fate would have it, or curiosity rather, Belinda at this moment entered the studio, attired in a sprigged cotton gown four inches shorter in front than behind as if to display to their full a pair of wonderful feet shod in list slippers. Her front hair was bound in Hindes' hair-binders tight down to her head, displaying a protruberant forehead that seemed to have been polished. It was the only thing polished about Belinda, and she made a not altogether pleasing picture as she slunk into the studio to "look for something," but in reality to take stock of the visitor. It would have been much happier for her if she had stayed away. She was slinking out again when Miss Hancock, who had been following her every movement, said: "Stop, please!" Belinda, with her hand on the door handle, faced round. "Are you the servant here?" "Yus"--sulkily. "And I suppose you are paid to keep this room in order. Where's your mistress?" "She's in Margate," cut in Leavesley.