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meek. I just want to see how far I can go without putting him in a passion.”

“Oh, well, I don’t object to that. Swanny is a good sort of fellow in the main—his bray is worse than his bite, as it were. So we will pass over that. Did I hear some young ladies saying, ‘Go on, you little brute!’ at tennis, yesterday?”

“Why, I was talking to the ball, of course. That’s nothing.”

“No, oh no, of course not. I did not think it was—but, I know you will be angry with me, and that will spoil my picture; just turn your head ever so little to the right, please. There!”

. . . . Years after, in a distant land, Campbell turned out a portfolio full of half-finished sketches which he had never looked at since that day. He looked sadly at the graceful head and half-suggested background. Those few touches brought him back again to the surroundings of that summer afternoon. The trellised veranda, with its deeply-carved vine-leaves that made a frame for the cornfield sloping upward, and on the edge of the hill a farmhouse surrounded by its brown loaf-shaped haystacks; and beyond that a blue wavy line of mountain, cleft in two where the unseen river mysteriously forced its way through the narrow gorge. It