as artful enough to know that
no girl who ever fills a kettle lets it run over unless she is much
preoccupied. He chose to think she was preoccupied with him. So he
laughed, and she looked quickly round and blushed, and turned her back
upon him with ferocity.

He came boldly up to her.

"I'm so sorry," said he, in a coaxing, confidential, persuasive tone,
such as she had given him no proper encouragement to use, "that we've
had a sort of quarrel just at the last, and spoiled the impression of
you I wanted to carry away."

He was evidently in no hurry to carry anything away, though he went on
with the glove-buttoning with much energy.

She listened, with her eyes down, making, kettle and all, the prettiest
picture possible. There was no light in the outhouse except that which
came from a little four-penny brass hand-lamp, which the girl must have
lit just before her last entrance into the inner room. It was behind
her, on a shelf against the wall; and the light shone through the loose
threads of her fair hair, making an aureole round the side view of her
little head.

She was bewitching like that, so the susceptible Max thought, while he
debated with himself whether he now dared to try again for that small
reward. And he reluctantly decided that he did not dare. And again there
was something piquant in the fact of his not daring.

The girl, after a short pause, looked up; perhaps, though not so
susceptible as he, she was not insensible to the fact that Max was young
and handsome, well dressed, a little in love with her, and altogether
different from the types of male humanity most common to Limehouse.

"If," she suggested at last, with some hesitation, "you really think it
better to see my grandmother, she will be down very soon. I'm going to
make some tea; and you could wait, if you liked, in the next room."

"I should be delighted," said Max.

Off came the gloves; and as the girl tripped quickly into the adjoining
room, he followed with alacrity.

"Mind," cried she suddenly, as she turned from the fireplace and stood
by the table in an attitude of warning, "it is at your own risk, you
know, that you stay. You can guess that the people who belong to a
hole-and-corner place like this are not the sort you're accustomed to
meet at West-End dinner tables, nor yet at an archbishop's garden-party.
But as you've stayed so long, it will be better for me if you stay till
you have seen Granny, as she must have heard m