and try, with a prodigious stretch, to get herself awake, until she
heard the girl say casually:

"Her ban right in the sitting-room."

So it fell out that Rodney Aldrich had, for his second vivid picture of
her,--the first had been, you will remember, when she had seized the
conductor by both wrists, and had said in a blaze of beautiful wrath,
"Don't dare to touch me like that!"--a splendid, lazy, tousled creature,
in a chaotic glory of chestnut hair, an unlaced middy-blouse, a plaid
skirt twisted round her knees, and a pair of ridiculous red bedroom
slippers, with red pompons on the toes. The creature was stretching
herself with the grace of a big cat that has just been roused from a nap
on the hearth-rug.

If his first picture of her had been brief, his second one was
practically a snap-shot, because at sight of him, she flashed to her
feet.

So, for a moment, they confronted each other about equally aghast,
flushed up to the hair, and simultaneously and incoherently, begging
each other's pardon--neither could have said for what, the goddess out
of the machine being Inga, the maid-of-all-work. But suddenly, at a
twinkle she caught in his eye, her own big eyes narrowed and her big
mouth widened into a smile, which broke presently into her deep-throated
laugh, whereupon he laughed too, and they shook hands, and she asked him
to sit down.

[Illustration: At sight of him she flashed to her feet.]