“The owner of a sieve would say it could be made perfectly tight—­if it was wanted for a dishpan.  And you are at liberty to go back to-night—­much as we shall dislike to lose you.  I will take time to go over, right now, and make sure of this thing for you.”

He rose as he spoke.

“Well, of all the positive gentlemen!  Will you stay to look at one more?  It may soften that austere mood.”

Miss Ruston gave him a third print.  It was of a very beautiful woman standing beside a window, the attitude apparently unstudied, the lighting unusual and picturesque, the whole effect challenging all conventional laws of photography.

“It’s very nice—­very nice,” said Burns, indifferently.  “But it’s not in it with the old lady by the fire.  I’ll run across and make sure of her quarters, if you please.”

“That will be wonderfully good of you,” and the guest looked after her host, dubiously, as he went out.

“Does one have to do everything he says, in these parts?” she inquired, glancing from Mrs. Burns to Miss Mathewson, both of whom were smiling.  Her own expression was an odd mixture of interest and rebellion.

Miss Mathewson spoke first.  “I have been his surgical assistant for more than nine years,” said she.  “When I have ventured to depart from the line he laid out for me I have—­been very sorry, afterward.”

“Did you ever venture to depart very far?”

“Do I look so meek?”

“You don’t look meek at all, but you do look—­conscientious.”  Miss Ruston gave her a daring look.

Amy spoke with more spirit than the others had expected.  “If I were not conscientious I couldn’t work for Dr. Burns.”

“He doesn’t look conscientious, to me,” declared Miss Ruston.  “He looks adventurous, audacious, unexpected.”

“Perhaps he is.  But he doesn’t expect his assistant nurse to be adventurous, audacious, or unexpected!”

“Good for you!” Miss Ruston was laughing, and looking with newly roused interest at this young woman, whom she had perhaps taken to be of a more commonplace type than her words now indicated.  “As for my friend, Mrs. Burns—­he is her husband, and she must have known what he was like, since I, in one short hour, have already discovered two or three of his characteristics!  Well, here’s hoping he’s on my side, when he comes back.  If he’s not—­”

But when he came back he was on her side, reluctantly convinced by a painstaking examination of the possibilities in the old cottage, and by a man-to-man talk with its owner as to his good faith in promising to carry out the lessee’s requirements.

“Though what in the name of time possesses a stunning girl like that to come here and shut herself up in Aunt Selina’s old rookery, I can’t make out,” the landlord, Burns’s neighbour, had confessed.

“Possibly she won’t shut herself up,” Burns had suggested, though he himself had been unable to discover the mysterious attraction of the little old house.  The garden promised better, he thought.  He could understand her being caught by the forsaken though powerful charm of that.  Doubtless it would furnish backgrounds for her outdoor photography, which would put to blush any painted screens such as the village photographers were accustomed to use.