“Oh,” said he carelessly, “I prowl.” “As far away as that?” She looked at him, sidelong. “All around. I know that neighborhood like a book.” “What's the name of that alley?” “Alley? Er--what alley?” “Mr. Cyrus Murphy, how long have you been following me about?” He turned an unpicturesque, dull red. “Well, that's no place for a girl alone,” he growled. “You know, one evening I thought I saw you, down near Avenue C, but I couldn't be sure. Was it?” “It might have been,” he grudged. “Avenue C is a public thoroughfare.” “And you've been guarding me,” she murmured. Her eyes brooded on him, and the color was rising in her face to match his. But, while Cyrus blushed like a brick, the Bonnie Lassie blushed like the hue of flying clouds after sunset. “Why don't you take a policeman?” he blurted out. “If anything should happen to you--It isn't safe,” he concluded lamely. “Not even when I'm chaperoned with an ammonia popgun?” she smiled. “Why do you carry that?” “For dogs. Dogs don't always like me. It's my clothes, I suppose.” “Any dog who wouldn't like and trust you on sight,” she pronounced with intense conviction, “is an imbecile.” He smiled his acknowledgment. At that her face altered. “There you go, smiling once more,” she said fretfully. “You do it very seldom, but--” “I'm always smiling, deep inside me, at you,” he said quietly. “But when you smile outside, it makes you so different. And I find I've done you all wrong.” “Are you still sculping me?” he asked in surprise. “I--I have been, but I stopped.” She paused, trying again to think of him as merely a model, and found, to her discomfiture, that it caused a queer, inexplicable little pang deep inside her heart. Nevertheless, the artist rose overpoweringly within her at his next question. “Do you want me to sit for you again?” “Oh, would you? Now?” He glanced at the church clock. “I've forty-seven minutes,” he said. Much may be accomplished in forty-seven minutes. In the studio she sprang to her work with a sort of contained fury. And as the eager, intent eyes regarded him with an ever-increasing impersonality, a pain was born in his heart and grew and burned, because to this woman who had clung to him in the abandonment of mortal weakness but an hour before, whose pulses had leaped and fluttered for his peril, he had become only a subject for exploitation, something to further her talent, wax to her deft hand. Perhaps he had been that since the first. Well, what right had he to expect anything more?