“David, I don’t see how you could!”

“It doesn’t take me any time at all to make up my mind-not about important things.”

“It’s taken you time enough to tell me. I thought you were falling in love with Moira Herne.”

“Her? I just wanted to paint her.”

“How was I to know that? You never took your eyes off her!”

“You can’t paint a woman if you don’t look at her-at least I can’t. Sally, I want to paint you-I’ve wanted to paint you all along! Only I was afraid if I did that I’d be saying all the kind of things I had made up my mind I wasn’t going to say until I’d got on a bit.”

He had his arms round her, and there was something in his voice that tugged at her heart. She gave him the smile which he had always found undermining.

“What sort of things, darling? Nice ones?”

He nodded. It was getting difficult to speak.

Sally said softly,

“Why don’t you say some of them now?”

Patricia Wentworth

Born in Mussoorie, India, in 1878, Patricia Wentworth was the daughter of an English general. Educated in England, she returned to India, where she began to write and was first published. She married, but in 1906 was left a widow with four children, and returned again to England where she resumed her writing, this time to earn a living for herself and her family. She married again in 1920 and lived in Surrey until her death in 1961.

Miss Wentworth’s early works were mainly historical fiction, and her first mystery, published in 1923, was The Astonishing Adventure of Jane Smith. In 1928 she wrote The Case Is Closed and gave birth to her most enduring creation, Miss Maud Silver.