A Fair Fraud — page 92: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

CHAPTER VI But after dinner, when Mr Edgar Naylor came into the drawing-room, one of the long tail of black coats that crept in one by one to join the ladies, the first thing he did was to stand still for a few moments just inside the door whilst he took a comprehensive survey of the occupants of the large square room. Then having discovered that Marion Blake was sitting on a distant sofa by the side of a very dull-looking elderly young lady, whom she had, from a sense of duty to her aunt, been doing her best to entertain for the last half- hour, he made a bee line, so to speak, straight for that sofa, and stood up in front of her, tall — and lean and brown, with his keen dark eyes fixed upon her. Then he asked her one of those vapid ques- tions with which he had originally intended to ply her. ‘Are you musical, Miss Blake ?’ Marion looked up at him with a little sur- prise. ‘Not particularly, Mr Naylor.’ ‘Don’t you play the piano, or the fiddle, or the banjo, or the bones—or something? or, at F GOMMGIOO oO C' Q)