Burns
preceded Leaver and knocked at the door.
"Will you take a shot at my friend before he goes?" Burns asked
Charlotte. "He hates standing up to be shot at, but I have him primed
for the ordeal."
"Must it be a shot, or may I make a portrait?" asked the photographer, in
her professional manner.
"I want a portrait," replied Burns, promptly. "Your best indoor
work--Brant and the Misses Kendall put on their mettle to rival it."
While Charlotte was absent, making ready her plates, her visitors waited
in the little living-room and looked about it. Its walls were now
possessed of many interesting photographs of people in the village,
among them several of Burns himself, at which he gazed with a quizzical
expression.
"She certainly succeeds in making a hero of me, doesn't she?" he
observed. "Red hair turns dusky before the camera, luckily for me. I look
as if there wasn't much of anything I couldn't do, including playing
leading man in a melodrama--eh?"
"She has caught the personality, cleverly enough," Leaver commented,
looking over Burns's shoulder.
"I rather think, though," mused Burns, "that I don't look so much as if
there wasn't anything I couldn't do as that I thought there wasn't.
There's a difference, Jack,--eh? Do I really seem as ready to bounce out
of my chair and tackle somebody as that picture makes me look? If I do I
need to have a tourniquet applied somewhere about my neck to stop the
flow of blood to my bumptious head.
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