The speaker put up two small hands to straighten some of the elaborate curls and twists with which her pretty head was crowned. There was a little consciousness in the action. The thought of her cousin had evidently brought with it the thought of some of those things of which the stern Dora disapproved. David looked at the brown hair and the slim fingers as he was meant to look at them. Yet in his smiling good humour there was not a trace of bashfulness or diffidence. He was perfectly at his ease, with something of a proud self-reliant consciousness in every movement; nothing in his manner could have reminded a spectator of the traditional apprentice making timid love to his master's daughter. 'I've seen you stand up to her though,' he said laughing. 'It's like all pious people. Doesn't it strike you as odd that they should never be content with being pious for themselves?' He looked at her with bright sarcastic eyes. 'Oh, I know what you mean!' she said with an instant change of tone; 'I didn't mean anything of the sort. I think it's shocking of you to go to that place on Sundays--so there, Mr. Grieve.' She threw herself back defiantly against the books which walled the shop, her arms folded before her. The attitude showed the long throat, the rounded bust, and the slender waist compressed with some evident rigour into a close-fitting brown dress. That Miss Purcell thought a great deal of the fashion of her hair, the style of her bodices, and the size of her waist was clear; that she was conscious of thinking about them to good purpose was also plain. But on the whole the impression of artificiality, of something over-studied and over-done which the first sight of her generally awakened, was soon, as a rule, lost in another more attractive--in one of light, tripping youth, perfectly satisfied with itself and with the world. 'I don't think you know much about the place,' he said quietly, still smiling. She flushed, her foolish little sense of natural superiority to 'the assistant' outraged again, as it had been outraged already a hundred times since she and David Grieve had met. 'I know quite as much as anybody need know--any respectable person--' she maintained angrily. 'It's a low, disgraceful place--and they talk wicked nonsense. Everyone says so. It doesn't matter a bit where Uncle Lomax goes--he's mad--but it is a shame he should lead other people astray.' She was much pleased with her own harangue, and stood there frowning on him, her sharp little chin in the air, one foot beating the ground. 'Well, yes, really,' said David in a reflective tone; 'one would think Miss Dora had her hands full at home, without--' He looked up, significantly, smiling. Lucy Purcell was enraged with him--with his hypocritical sympathy as to her uncle's misdoings--his avoidance of his own crime. 'It's not uncle at all, it's you!' she cried, with more logic than appeared. 'I tell you, Mr. Grieve, father won't stand it.'