‘I suppose it is the last penny?’ asks she, still addressing Dom in a whisper, but with a magisterial air. ‘Yes—nearly,’ says he. The ‘nearly’ is a concession to the truth. He has, indeed, three shillings left out of his monthly allowance, but these are already accounted for. They are to buy three copies of Betty for his own special apartment—one to be hung up over his gun, one over his bookcase, and one over his study table. ‘That’s the one you’ll never see,’ Betty had said to him tauntingly, and most ungratefully, when he told her of the decision he had come to about his last three shillings. Miss Barry, now turning away from him with a heart decidedly heavy, directs her conversational powers on Crosby. ‘I congratulate you on being in good time,’ says she. ‘When Betty and I started, we had great trouble in getting Carew and Dominick to come with us. They were dreadfully late, and we said then—Betty and I—that you would surely be late. But you’—smiling and wagging her curls—‘have behaved splendidly. I do appreciate a young man who can be punctual.’ Susan glances quickly at her. ‘Young man!’ Is she in earnest, and after all that Betty had said? ‘Young man!’ Is he a young man? Well, she has often thought so—she had even told Betty so. Here she glances at Betty, but Betty is now enjoying a word-to-word dispute with Dominick. Any way, she had told her. But Betty—what does she know? She has declared a man once over thirty, old. But Aunt Jemima thinks otherwise. And really, when one comes to think of it, Aunt Jemima at times is very clever—almost deep, indeed; and certainly very clever in her conclusions. ‘Look! there are the Blakes coming out,’ cries Betty suddenly; she is standing on tiptoe at the window, which commands a fine view of the entrance to the photographer’s. ‘Auntie, Susan, let us go, before any other people come.’ With this they all in a body cross the road, Carew having caught up Bonnie, who is all eagerness to see this wonderful thing that will put Susan’s face on paper. Upstairs they march in a body, to find themselves presently in a most evil-smelling corridor, out of which the studio opens. Here they wait perforce, until at last the studio door opens, and some people of the farming class, and very flurried and flushed, walk nervously down the little lane between them. ‘Now is your time!’ says Betty, who is really quite irrepressible to-day. She takes the lead, and they all swarm after her into the studio, to find there an emaciated man in highly respectable clothes regarding them with a melancholy eye. Collodion seems to have saturated him. ‘Aunt Jemima, you first,’ says Susan. ‘Yes, certainly,’ says Dom. ‘First come, first served. And, you know, in spite of Betty’s well-meant endeavours, you entered the room first.’