Troy looked at her host who was also her subject. A very rewarding subject, she thought, and one with whom it would be fatally easy to confuse interpretation with caricature. That ovoid forehead, that crest of fuzz, those astonished, light-blue eyes and the mouth that was perpetually hitched up at the corners in a non-smile! But, Troy thought, isn’t interpretation, of necessity, a form of caricature?

She found Hilary contemplating her as if she was the subject and he the scrutator.

“Look here,” Troy said abruptly, “you’ve not by any chance been pulling my leg? About the servants and all that?”

“No.”

“No?”

“I assure you. No.”

“O.K.,” said Troy. “I’m going back to work. I’ll be about ten minutes fiddling and brooding and then if you’ll sit again, we’ll carry on.”

“But of course. I am enjoying myself,” Hilary said, “inordinately.”

Troy returned to the library. Her brushes as usual had been cleaned in turpentine. Today they had been set out together with a nice lump of fresh rag. Her paint-encrusted smock had been carefully disposed over a chair-back. An extra table covered with paper had been brought in to supplement a makeshift bench. Mervyn again, she thought, the booby-trap chap who used to paint signs.

And as she thought of him he came in, wary-looking and dark about the jaw.

“Excuse me,” Mervyn said, and added “madam” as if he’d just remembered to do so. “Was there anything else?”

“Thank you, very much,” Troy said. “Nothing. It’s all marvellous,” and felt she was being unnaturally effusive.

“I thought,” Mervyn mumbled, staring at the portrait, “you could do with more bench space. Like. Madam.”

“Oh, rather. Yes. Thank you.”

“Like you was cramped. Sort of.”

“Well — not now.”

He said nothing but he didn’t go. He continued to look at the portrait. Troy, who never could talk easily about work in progress, began to set her palette with her back to Mervyn. When she turned round it gave her quite a shock to find him close beside her.