“It’s true enough I get my folly from you,” said the elder man, not ill-humouredly.

“Oh, no more speeches of that sort! I’ve the whip-hand of you for a good while,” said Jack, triumphantly. “You can’t say I ever dressed up as a model to get into a house.”

“To get into a house!” Everitt frowned. “Certainly that was not my motive.”

“What then?” demanded the imperturbable Jack.

“Merely that that brute came drunk, and I had promised to send some one.”

“Oh!”

“What do you mean by your ‘oh’? it was, I tell you—hotly. I dare say. But it won’t look like it to them when they find it out.”

“What do you mean?”

“Only what I say. You’ll be run in, somehow, of course; you’re not the sort of fellow to do it under the rose. Well, when it comes out they won’t believe but that you had some object in view.”

“Go on, Jack; you’re a marvel of precocious wisdom! I tell you, I’d never seen or heard of them before.”

“Not Miss Aitcheson?”

“Oh, Miss Aitcheson! I’m sure I never want to see Miss Aitcheson again.”

“Was she there?”

“Yes.”

“And don’t you suppose she recognised you?”

“Shouldn’t wonder.”

“Well, you have put your foot in it.”

“What’s the harm? I promised a model; he failed, and I went myself.”

“Oh, no particular harm,” said Jack, coolly; “no harm at all, I dare say; only if I had happened to do such a thing—”

“You!” repeated Everitt, looking at Jack. Put in this manner, the idea certainly appeared intolerable. “You! Oh, you’re different.”

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