Eliza picked up an egg, and bent so fiery a glance on the intruder that he dodged out of sight for a second. "Listen, _carissima_," he pleaded, peering round the jamb of the door again. "If the alarm found its way upstairs I must have been walking in my sleep. While you were dreaming of suffragettes I may have been dreaming of you." "Stop there a bit longer, chatterin' and callin' me names, an' your bacon will be frizzled to a cinder," she retorted. "But I really hoped to save you some trouble by carrying in the breakfast tray myself. I hate to see a jolly, good-tempered woman of your splendid physique working yourself to a shadow." * * * * * Eliza squared her elbows as a preliminary to another outburst, when the stairs creaked. Mary, the "help," was arriving hurriedly, in curl papers. "Oh, _you_'ve condescended to get up, have you?" was the greeting Mary received. "Why, it's on'y ten minutes to six!" cried the astonished girl, gazing at a grandfather's clock as if it were bewitched. "You've never had such a shock since you were born," went on the sarcastic Eliza. "But don't thank _me_, my girl. Thank Mr. Trenholme, the gentleman stannin' there grinnin' like a Cheshire cat. Talk to him nicely, an' p'raps he'll paint your picter, an' then your special butcher boy will see how beautiful you reelly are." "Jim don't need tellin' anything about that," said the girl, smiling, for Eliza's bark was notoriously worse than her bite. "Jim!" came the snorting comment. "The first man who ever axed me to marry him was called Jim, an' when, like a wise woman, I said 'No,' he went away an' 'listed in the Royal Artillery an' lost his leg in a war--that's what Jim did." "What a piece of luck you didn't accept him!" put on Trenholme. "An' why, I'd like to know?" "Because he began by losing his head over you. If a leg was missing, too, there wasn't much of Jim left, was there?" Mary giggled, and Eliza seized the egg again; so Trenholme ran to his sitting-room. Within half an hour he was passing through the High Street, bidding an affable "Good morning" to such early risers as he met, and evidently well content with himself and the world in general. His artist's kit revealed his profession even to the uncritical eye, but no student of men could have failed to guess his bent were he habited in the garb of a costermonger. The painter and the poet are the last of the Bohemians, and John Trenholme was a Bohemian to the tips of his fingers.