After a while when Mrs Broughton had piled the fagots as high as she could pile them, she got up from her seat and prepared to leave the room.  Much of the piling consisted, of course, in her own absence during a portion of these sittings.  ‘Conway,’ she said, as she went, ’if this is to be the last sitting, or the last but one, you should make the most of it.’  Then she threw upon him a very peculiar glance over the head of the kneeling Jael, and withdrew.  Jael, who in those moments would be thinking more of the fatigue of her position than anything else, did not at all take home to herself the peculiar meaning of her friend’s words.  Conway Dalrymple understood them thoroughly, and thought that he might as well take the advice given to him.  He had made up his mind to propose to Miss Van Siever, and why should he not do so now?  He went on with his brush for a couple of minutes without saying a word, working as well as he could work, and then resolved that he would at once begin the other task.  ‘Miss Van Siever,’ he said, ‘I am afraid you are tired?’

’Not more than usually tired.  It is fatiguing to be slaying Sisera by the hour together.  I do get to hate this block.’  The block was the dummy by which the form of Sisera was supposed to be typified.

‘Another sitting will about finish it,’ said he, ’so that you need not positively distress yourself now.  Will you rest yourself for a minute or two?’ He had already perceived that the attitude in which Clara was posed before him was not one in which an offer of marriage could be received and replied to with advantage.

‘Thank you, I am not tired yet,’ said Clara, not changing the fixed glance of national wrath with which she regarded her wooden Sisera as she held her hammer on high.

‘But I am.  There; we will rest for a moment.’  Dalrymple was aware that Mrs Dobbs Broughton, though she was very assiduous in piling her fagots, never piled them for long together.  If he did not make haste she would be back upon them before he could get his word spoken.  When he put down his brush, and got up from his chair, and stretched out his arm as a man does when he ceases for a moment from his work, Clara of course got up also, and seated herself.  She was used to her turban and her drapery, and therefore thought of it not at all; and he also was used to it, seeing her in it two or three times a week; but now that he intended to accomplish a special purpose, the turban and drapery seemed to be in the way.  ‘I do so hope you will like the picture,’ he said, as he was thinking of this.

’I don’t think I shall.  But you will understand that it is natural that a girl should not like herself in such a portraiture as that.’

’I don’t know why.  I can understand that you specially should not like the picture; but I think that most women in London in your place would at any rate say that they did.’

‘Are you angry with me?’