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RED POPPIES

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RED POPPIES

A NOVEL

MARGARETE MUNSTERBERG

Author of **Anna Borden* s Career "

NEW YORK AND LONDON
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY

191S

/Google

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THE NEW "ORK
PUBLIC UPPARY

678821A

ASTOR, LENOX AND

TILDEN FOUNDATIONS

H 1933 L

••• ••• ••

Printed in the United States of America

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To
UNCLE OTTO

S Digitized by GoOQIc

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CONTENTS

CHAPTXK 'AOB

I. The Vision i

n. The Parsonage and Mira Make 17

in. The Birthday Wish 33

rv. Christmas Comes But Once a Year . . • . 64

V. In Aunt Clarissa's Garden 93

VI. The Study in Green and Blue 118

Vn. The Song with Strange Words 151

Vm. Ashes 171

IX. The Vision Grows Pale 189

X. The Sculptress 220

XI. BoBEME 233

XII. The Vision Grows Tainted 249

Xin. The Vision Has Fled 269

XIV. The Vision Again 286

XV. The "Red Poppies" 304

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RED POPPIES

CHAPTER I

THE VISION

WAS it morning so soon? Was it a sunbeam that
had waked him up, knocking on his eyelids with
a hearty knock? Come in, sunbeam! Welcome, morn-
ing! Oh, but the dreams one can have in this strange,
great, wide bed with the blue canopy — dreams — of what?
Peter had forgotten. No, the morning was best, after
all, the jolly, golden morning.

So Peter jumped out of bed and ran to the open win-
dow, where the sunbeam that had waked him was mak*
ing a golden gleam on the panes. Peter had never waked
up in any bed but his own before, and it was wonderful
to run to the window and look out and see something
new. It was quite new to look on a barnyard across
the road instead of the solemn white house that Peter
saw from his window at home. A barnyard with white
hens and black hens and speckled hens and a proud
rooster, and behind the barnyard a little sparkling brook
with a bridge over it and thick woods beyond !

Peter stamped his bare foot on the solid floor to feel
that he was at his grandmother's all alive and real, and
not only making believe or in his sleep. They had
promised him this visit to his grandmother's so long»
till he had been afraid that it would never happen at

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RED POPPIES

all« and then« when he and his mother had really left
home, the journey had been so long — Oh, so almost end-
less, that Peter had believed this whole visit to be a
kind of mischievous trick, a game played on a naughty
boy. But the journey did have an end, and Peter had
been lifted out of the train in the black night, and then
lifted into a carriage, and then

Oh, what funny wallpaper, with ships and houses and
trees on it — ^always the same ships and houses and trees,
all over the wall ! Quite a picture-book that was for rainy
days! But there were real pictures too on the picture-
book wallpaper, very dark, very sad-looking pictures*
No— 4ie would not look at them now, he would get
dressed quickly — ^all alone, secretly — ^and then slip out of
doors into the simshine, before anyone else in the house
was awake.

There was surely no harm in skipping out of doors
early in the morning, and yet Peter, when he had fin-
ished putting on his sailor-suit, crept on tiptoes out of
the room into the strange narrow hallway. The truth
was that Peter was afraid of a meeting on the stairs
with his grandmother, whom he would not know again
in the morning, so sleepy had he been last night when he
had arrived and seen her as in a queer dream. But old,
old grandmothers would not be up so early anyway, and
mothers would be resting from the long journey, and
only little boys would be up and out in the sunshine.

At the end of the long, strange corridor there was a
square place, which was not exactly a hall and not a
real room either, where something uncanny stood in a
comer that looked like a wheel with fuzzy gray hair —
a spinning-wheel, truly, like the one that pricked the

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THE VISION

Sleeping Beauty and made her sleep in a hedge of thorns
till the Prince came and waked her up. Peter thought
he would like to have a little adventure — ^not Uke finding
a princess asleep in a hedge, nothing that would make
one shy like that, but just a nice, little adventure for a
little boy. Because, after all, what else did one go away
from home for?

Peter crept down the steep, white stairs that had a
funny way of turning, and then stopped in the hall be-
low, wondering through which of the two opposite doors
to go out : one was a great, heavy, white door, the house
door, no doubt — ^the other was smaller, and open a little,
with only the screen-door shut, so that something green
was peeping at Peter from outside. Could this door
lead to the garden — grandmother's garden that Peter's
mother had often told him about?

Carefully Peter opened the door, then the screen-door,
and then he looked

Oh! — Was it true? Peter clapped his hands, Peter
laughed ; Peter felt so queer, he felt so queer and happy.
It was so beautiful, so altogether wonderful, it made him
almost cry — ^no, it made him laugh; it made him dance
and skip; it made him want to run a race — no, it made
him stand quite still and wonder. What was it that
Peter saw in his grandmother's garden that gave him
such a shock of joy? It was poppies, red poppies — ^a
big, blazing burst of red poppies ! Peter knew poppies.
He had seen pink and white poppies before, and red
poppies, too, single poppies on slim stems in gardens,
or poppies in little clusters, or beds with poppies of
different shades ; but he had never seen poppies, poppies,
poppies so close together that they were all one and all

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RED POPPIES

red. And such a red ! It was not at all like a common
red — ^not like the red on his mother's hat, or the red of the
tablecloth in the playroom at home — ^no, it was blood-red,
it was like the red of the sun when it rose late on winter
mornings so that Peter could see it from the pla)rroom
window, and it looked like bloody fire ; it was a red that
made one want to do something very great, very noble,
something very much like a hero

Red poppies! Red poppies! Were they quite true?
Would they be here the next moment, or would he wake

up and find himself alone, with no poppies at all ?

Peter shut his eyes to make quite sure ; he shut his eyes
a long, long time, and prayed that when he opened them
again, the red poppies would still be true.

And Peter opened his eyes again. Wonder upon won-
der ! In the midst of the poppies stood a child with big,
shining eyes, and the sunbeams on her golden hair. She
seemed a fairy among the high red poppies that reached
almost to her shoulders. And behind the child and the
poppies, by the garden gate, stood a beautiful lady,
with silky dark hair and eyes clear gray, like the sea on
some misty days — sl lady that must have just stepped out
of a book of fairy tales. Peter wished that he had never
been bad, that he had never hidden his mother's work-
basket and never stolen jam out of the pantry — ^just be-
cause of that beautiful lady, who could never have been
bad and who must be some good child's fairy godmother.

And Peter looked at the child among the poppies, who
tossed back her head a little and laughed gaily. Then it
seemed to Peter as if all the bright red poppies were laugh-
ing with her, and Peter's heart was so full of joy that he
laughed too. He did not laugh aloud, he did not laugh as

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THE VISION

he used to do, when his father would tell him a funny
story, or when the postman would make faces at him, and
yet Peter knew that he was laughing as he had never
laughed before. "Red poppies ! Red poppies ! Red pop-
pies !" was all that he could say, and he said it over and
over again. Then all at once he ran away; he was so
afraid that the poppies and the child and the beautiful
lady would suddenly be gone, because they were all too
beautiful to be true, that he wanted rather to be gone
himself.

So Peter ran into the house, all aquiver with joy, and he
ran against his mother.

"Why, Peter!" she cried. "Where have you been so
early? And what makes you so excited?"

Peter laughed: how could she ever guess what he had
seen ! "The garden !" was all he could say.

"And what did you see in the garden?" asked his
mother.

Peter hesitated: should he give away his secret?
After all, Peter's mother could simply step out and see
all the wonder for herself, if it was truly there.

"Red poppies !" cried Peter, and he was laughing again,
laughing that queer laugh, which was really no laughter
at all, only joy.

"Why, if they're as fine as that," said Peter's mother,
"I must go out right away and look at them myself."

"No, no !" Peter cried and pulled her back by the sleeve.
Peter's mother stopped and looked at him in astonishment ;
and well she might, for Peter hardly knew himself why
he would not have her go, except that he wanted the red
poppies and the child and the strange lady to be all his
own — not even for his mother to see.

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"You're a funny boy!" said Peter's mother. "Now,
when you see Grandma, you must be very good, Peter,
and you mustn't be wild and ask her to chase you, or any-
thing like that, because she is very old, you know, Peter,
and has to sit always in one chair."

"Always in one chair !" mused Peter. "In the chair by
the window?"

For he wondered if his grandmother was always lodc-
ing down on the red poppies, all day, every day.

"Yes, the chair is by the window" said Peter's mother,
mildly. "Come, we'll go up before breakfast, and say
good-morning. Old Jenny is with her; she has taken care
of Grandma for twenty years."

Peter followed his mother up the winding staircase,
then through the square place with the spinning-wheel,
then along the corridor, past the room where he had slept,
on, on, round a corner, and then into a low, white room,
where the old, old grandmother sat in a deep armchair by
the window. Her face was round and merry; her hair
white like the muslin curtains at her window; her eyes
very kind and light blue. Behind her stood old Jenny,
with gray hair and spectacles.

"And here is my Peter !" said a cheery voice from the
chair. "Come to see his old grandma."

Peter had to be kissed, but that was soon over. Then
he glanced out of the window, and saw that it did not face
the garden at all, only the barnyard, the river, and the
woods — the same view that Peter had seen from his own
window this morning. Poor Grandma I There she sat by
a window all day, and could not look at the red poppies,
though they were so near. And yet Peter felt a little re-
lieved^-though it was wicked, surely, to be so tmgener-

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THE VISION

ous — ^that his red poppies were still quite his own, that
nobody was looking down at them from a window with-
out loving them as he did with all his heart,

"What are you thinking of, Peter?*' his grandmother
said kindly. "Should you like to live in an old, old house
like this, with an old, old grandmother?"

"I'd rather live here than in any other house in the
world," cried Peter, and he meant it.

"Bless his heart!" cried old Jenny, from behind the
chair, in a petting voice, and his grandmother cried : "My
darling boy !" and Peter had to be kissed again, though he
did not know why.

"Why do you like it here best?" asked old Jenny, with
a sweetish smile.

"Because of the garden I" cried Peter. He could not
say "the red poppies" — only "the garden!"

Theuj for some strange reason, Peter's grandmother
and old Jenny burst out laughing, and Peter's mother
shook her head and said reproachfully:

"Why, Peter, I thought you liked this house best of
all because Grandma lives here."

Peter htmg his head: what could he say to that?

"I like Grandma all right," he faltered. "But ''

"But Grandma is old and white," said the kind grand-
mother herself. "And the poppies in her garden are red
and young — isn't that it, Peter?"

"Yes, I guess that's it," said Peter, nodding solemnly.
The poppies were red and young — red and young! There
was so much to think about that Peter would like to have
run out of doors alone, far, far away, much rather than
stay here in the musty room and be stared at by old
Jenny, and even this good, wise grandmother.

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RED POPPIES

"Has your mother told you," the grandmother began,
"that you are not the only child in this house today?"

Peter shook his head.

"I thought I would surprise him/' said his mother.

"Now, poor lad," said the old Jenny, "he'll think there's
a jolly, six-year-old boy to romp with, and it's only a
three-year-old little girl."

Peter's heart stood still : the queen of the poppies, the
fairy-child, was here in the same house with him, a real
child like himself, and the beautiful lady was perhaps
her mother!

"You must be nice to little Virginia. Grey ," said Peter's
mother. "She is visiting here with her mother, just as
you are with me. They have been living in a warm
country across the sea, because the doctor wanted them
to, and some time they are going to live in their real
home, and that's in our own GuUport, Peter, so that you
may see little Virginia often then."

"I've seen them both," said Peter, and he felt that he
was growing very red in the face from pride. He knew
that his mother and grandmother would be surprised, and
they were.

"Where did you see them?" his mother asked, as if
she did not quite believe him.

"In the garden," said Peter, and he felt a little sad be-
cause his secret was lost.

"Now, go down to breakfast," his grandmother said
pleasantly, "and you'll see your friends of the garden
again."

Peter's mother stayed to break off a little flower from
the heliotrope pot on the window-sill.

"My favorite !" she said, and pinned it to her dress.

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THE VISION

That little, queer, curly heliotrope was his mother's
favorite flower : Oh, she had never seen red poppies !

Peter wanted his breakfast because he was hungry, and
yet he was a little afraid of following his mother into the
dining-room. They walked through two low, dim rooms,
with many dark, solemn pictures, and an odd perfume,
something like the smell that lingered round some old
cashmere shawls that Peter's mother kept in a flowered
box in the garret at home. Peter stepped into the din-
ing-room with a fluttering heart.

There she stood at the window, the beautiful lady of
the garden, so tall, with such a noble, straight nose and
sad gray eyes, so quite like an empress over many lands.
And the child beside her seemed smaller now than be-
fore among the poppies, a fairy sprite with curls like
sunshine and eyes like big, round moons.

The wonderful lady held out her hand to Peter and
said in a voice something like a piano when it is played
very gently:

"And this is Peter! You and Virginia must be good
friends, even though you are so much bigger. Your
mother and I went to school together, and we are the best
of friends."

To be friends with a fairy ! That was something that
Peter had not thought of, and could not think of yet.
He had never wanted to be friends with a little girl any-
way, but this was different; this was like being friends
with a bird, or with a poppy from the garden.

"I'll look at her !" said Peter, whereupon the beautiful
lady smiled kindly, and Peter's mother laughed aloud.

The fairy-child called Virginia was helped on to a
tower of cushions on a chair, across the table from Peter,

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RED POPPIES

and during breakfast, whenever Peter glanced at her, she
b^;an to laugh, and then Peter laughed too. There was
much golden honey for breakfast, and blackberries that
old Jenny had picked in the woods, and gradually Peter
felt more at home and less as if in a dream.

"Now I wonder what Peter would like to do this
sunny day," said the beautiful lady, when breakfast was
over.

Peter knew what he would like to do : he would like to
go back into the garden and just look at the red poppies
all day long. Perhaps the fairy-child would come into
the garden, too, and stand again among the poppies in
the sunshine. And yet what Peter said to the beautiful
lady was only :

"I'd like to go to the barnyard and look at the hens."
He did not dare to tell his real wish to the lady — ^he did
not know why, except, perhaps, that his mother would
look at him queerly. It was all so queer anyway, so very
queer, that he should still be seeing the red poppies, al-
though he was not really looking at them with his eyes
at all.

"Julie can take Virginia to see the hens, too," said the
beautiful lady. "And perhaps they can go for a little
walk in the woods, while we stay with Peter's grand-
mother."

The lady spoke to Peter's mother, who told him then
that Julie was Virginia's nurse, and spoke only French,
and that Virginia spoke very little English, too. How
just like a fairy-child to talk French! Then, besides, it
was a delight to Peter that he would not have to talk to
Julie, the red-cheeked, black-eyed nurse, who came into
the room with a little straw hat for the child, nor to Vir-

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THE VISION

ginia herself, whom he could just look at now without
ever saying a word, as if she were in a picture-book.

The beautiful lady kissed the child on her silky hair
before Julie put on the little straw hat. Then Peter's
mother told him to be good and to go only where Julie
went, and waved good-by to them at the house door.

Scarcely had they stepped out when the child, who till
now had barely said three words, turned to the nurse and
talked very quickly in the strange language, and it
sounded as if she were singing an odd, sprightly song.
It seemed to Peter that she must be chirping a fairy
tongue, the kind that birds understand, and butterflies
when they flutter round red poppies.

When they stood leaning against the wire netting round
the barnyard to watch the white hens and the black hens
and the speckled hens run to and fro, Virginia clapped her
hands and made very joyful outcries in that queer, gay
language of hers. But Peter could not be so happy over
the hens : he did not like the way their tails stuck up in the
air, nor the way they wiggled along on their shriveled lit-
tle feet, nor could he take any fancy to the wrinkles round
their eyes. Swans were much nicer than hens — ^the white,
slim-throated swans in the pond at home — and even
ducks, specially the wild ducks when they flew over the
sea.

All at once Virginia turned away, as if she did not like
the hens any more, and chattering very fast to Julie,
pointed to the woods across the stream. Then Julie took
the child by the hand and they all crossed the little bridge
over the gay, sparkling river, where willows were dipping
their silvery leaves into the water, then strolled on — ^the
child tripping with tiny steps — into the woods that looked

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RED POPPIES

so shady and cool. There was a strong smell of pine nee-
dles, almost a fragrance of Christmas, though it was
August, and the air was drowsy; and there were many
little sounds and stirrings in the woods, perhaps of squir-
rels overhead, or bird's wings, or chipmunks among the
fallen leaves. While Julie went to pick blackberries, the
child sat down on the moss, and her eyes were wide open
in wonder. Peter stood still under a tree and wondered
too ; it seemed indeed as if something wonderful must hap-
pen any moment, as if a hobgoblin should step from be-
hind that big pine tree and make a low bow and say : "At
your service, fairy king and queen !" or a squirrel should
drop a golden nut and say : "Have this for your Christ-
mas tree, and remember your friends in the woods V* or
as if the red poppies of the garden should spring up all
at once out of the moss, all in one instant, by magic, and
make the whole dark wood gleam with their fiery light.

The red poppies! Peter began to be homesick for
them; the woods were so shadowy and sober, and the
sunshine only peeped in through holes between the leaves.
Julie came back from the bushes and brought the black-
berries she had picked, on a big green leaf, and Peter and
the fairy-child had a regal feast. But when that was over,
and nothing wonderful happened, after all, Peter wished
that he were playing in the sunshine, although he did not
want to leave the fairy-child, and he did not dare to speak
to the nurse for fear that she would look blank and not
understand.

"Peter! Peter! Where are you ?"

That was a homelike voice, ringing through the quiet
of the woods, and Peter's mother stepped through the
bushes, briskly, while a lock of her blonde hair was caught

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THE VISION

on a twig. She spoke first to the nurse in the strange lan-
guage — Peter's own mother in the speech of the fairy
queen — ^and then turned to Peter.

"Grandma wants to see something of Virginia, too/'
she said. ''And while she goes back with Julie and has a
little visit with Grandma, you and I can take a walk»
Peter, and I'll show you the places where I used to play
when I was six."

Peter's mother had promised him this walk for a long,
long time, even before he knew that he would really make
a visit to his grandmother's so soon; but now that the
time for that walk had really come, Peter wished that he
might go back with the child, back into the garden, where
the red poppies were waiting. But he could not tell his
mother that he would rather stay in a garden than walk
in the woods and see the places where she had played
when she was his age. Besides, he wanted to have seen
something to tell his father about, when he should come
home from his first journey, and what would his father
think of Peter if he had spent the whole day in a garden !

The fairy-child waved good-by, and at the hand of
Julie tripped out of the woods. Now Peter tramped
briskly beside his mother on the path strewn with brown
pine needles beneath the tall pines and fir trees, like
Christmas trees without the nuts, and trees with leaves,
too — mostly beeches, as his mother said. When they
came to a little brook, bubbling over pebbles, Peter's
mother said : "There we used to go in wading on hot vaca-
tion days ;" when they found an aged, giant tree-trunk in
their way, she said, cheerfully : "There we used to sit and
tell stories about the old man who lived in the tree ;" and
when they suddenly came upon a clear place, with a few

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RED POPPIES

birch trees only, she told Peter how they had played tag
there and hide-and-seek. Then Peter would look, and
Peter would listen, but his heart was not with the brook
or the tree-trunk, or the clear place, or his mother's child-
hood ; his heart was with the poppies in the garden. The
woods, except for the few clearings, were dark and sol-
emn ; the poppies were bright and made his heart laugh.
Even when they had stepped out of the woods into the sun-
light, and they crossed a big field where his mother said
that she used to play ball after school, Peter wondered how
far they still were from his grandmother's house. He
would not linger in the house at all, but as soon as they
had come back he would rush into the garden, while the
sun was still at its brightest, so that no minute should be
lost without the poppies.

They were walking down the road now toward the
broad, white house, with the boxwood hedge leading up to
the doorsteps, and the two hydrangea pots on the porch.

"Your shoes are very dusty,*' said Peter's mother, as
she pounded on the door with the shining knocker. "You
must brush them off. And I want you to put on your new
suit before dinner, anyway. Grandma has dinner at one,
you know ; so you must hurry."

If Peter had wanted to play in the fields with other boys,
he would have begged : "Oh, let me stay out a while !" —
but he did not dare to say, "Let me stay in the garden all
alone," lest his mother should think him queer, and look
at him with a certain startled light in her gray-blue eyes.
Peter did not want to be queer, and he knew somehow
that it was very queer to be thinking about nothing else
all day than bright red poppies. So he meekly put on his
new, white suit, and when he was dressed and combed, old

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THE VISION

Jenny called him to dinner, so that a flight to the garden
had to be put off again. But at dinner he saw the beauti-
ful lady again, and the fairy-child, and there was some-
thing about them that made the red poppies seem very
near. The lady and his mother talked much about old
times and of how happy life was under ten years of age,
till Peter wondered why life was not much happier for
his mother now, when she could do what she wanted to
every minute, and could tell him what to do besides. But
the beautiful lady, who sometimes had a sad light in her
gray eyes, Peter thought, might perhaps have been hap-
pier when she had looked gay like her fairy-child.

As soon as dinner was over Peter wanted to make a
dash for the door that led to the garden, when old Jenny
announced :

"Peter, your grandmother would like to see you now.
She says she hasn't seen you since before breakfast."

Peter would have protested, begging that he might put
off this call on his grandmother for yet a little while, had
not the beautiful lady looked straight at him with her clear
gray eyes, so that he could not say a word. And Peter
had to talk with his grandmother by the window with the
heliotrope pots, pleasantly and politely, like a good grand-
son, as if he were not longing wildly for the red poppies
in the garden. But the moment came when old Jenny
had sent Peter downstairs, because his grandmother
needed her nap, when the fairy-child was already sleeping
in her room, under the care of Julie, when Peter's mother
and the beautiful lady had withdrawn into the cool, dim
sitting-room, to escape the heat outside — ^and Peter was
free.

Peter was free to fly out and face the poppies again.

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RED POPPIES

But he lingered by the door, suddenly shy. If they should
be gone, if a wind should have blown all the red poppy
leaves away ! Tears came into Peter's eyes, and his hand
trembled on the doorknob. If, perhaps, he had not seen
them at all, because it had been so early in the morning —
perhaps he had not been awake !

Peter opened the door and skipped down into the gar-
den ; there they were, all the many, many poppies, glow-
ing like one blood-red fire. Peter's heart beat very fast,
and he was laughing again ; he was laughing in his heart.
He was laughing because the red poppies were true, be-
cause they were as good as fairyland and yet were true;
he was laughing because the poppies were red; he was
laughing because a mild wind was passing over them this
minute, and making them sway lightly, and the red flower
leaves flutter ; he was laughing because the poppies were
all his own, because they were there for Peter's own eyes
to see

He wanted to sing, to call out, to tell someone of his
joy, but he could only whisper:

"Red poppies ! Red poppies !"

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CHAPTER II

THE PARSONAGE AND MIRA MARE

THERE was always something solemn at home in Gull-
port about the hour between church and Sunday
dinner. Peter's father would seem still to be thinking of his
sermon, as if he had to give it over again, and his mother
would look as if she were still singing hymns. Then it
sometimes happened that Peter's father would preach
a second sermon at home — a special sermon for little boys
of eight — with the jam-pots instead of the flesh-pots of
Egypt, in language much less grand than the grown-up
sermon, which was hard to understand but beautiful to
hear.

It was on account of such a simplified sermon which
might come that Peter lingered in the yard and watched
the yellow leaves spin round in the wind, very bright yel-
low against a sunny blue sky, and then he thought of the
wonderful light that a sunbeam had made playing on the
sea-green stained glass in church this morning, a light
that had made him think of many happy things, such as a
Christmas tree, or a lovely sea-shell, or a humming bird
on a bush. The Sanboms, who lived in the stately white
house across the road, were coming home now — ^they must
have taken a walk after church — ^and a gloomy couple
they looked, both very long and thin and dark, with sol-

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emn faces, as if they had never laughed at something
funny in all their lives. No wonder that was, either;
they lived all alone in that big, solemn house, and there
were no children to play in the yard under the jolly apple
trees. There was no little boy in sight anywhere at this
hushed hour ; all were at home, very grown-up and good,
just as Peter was in his best Sunday suit. But after din-
ner he would put his play-clothes on again and whistle be-
fore Dick Taylor's window and run to the beach with
him to play. Peter wondered what the gentleman would
be like, who was coming all the way from Boston to
have dinner with them today, and would ride back again
tonight. Peter had heard his father say that this gentle-
man was still very young, but that he was a genius. A
genius! Peter wondered what that could mean. He
would go in and ask.

When Peter came into his father's study, he saw his
father and mother both look very thoughtful, as if they
had been talking about something uncommon. His father
was stretched out in his easy chair with an open book
in his hands, which he did not read, and his mother was
leaning on the window-sill, looking out over the road.

"You look so awfully solemn !" said Peter, glad to hear
his own voice in the hush of the study. "What have you
been talking about?"

Peter's mother looked at him in a queer way, and his
father said in a low voice:

"We were talking about what we hope you will be when
you are grown up."

Peter wished he had stayed in the garden ; he had for-
gotten the question he meant to ask, and he had a horror
of solemn talk.

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"Peter," his father b^an, slowly, "did you understand
the first lesson I read in church today?"

Oh, the sermon for eight-year-olds was banning, and
Peter even more heartily wished himself back in the yard.
He tried to think what forbidden deed he had done this
last week, but his mind was blank. As for the text of this
morning's lesson — ^he must have been looking at the
sunlight on the glass window just at the time it was
readl

"Your mother was just reminding me," Peter's father
went on, "that I read the same lesson when you were a
little baby a month old. It is the story of little Samuel
that I read, the Samuel who grew up to be a great prophet.
His mother was so happy over her little boy that she
brought him into the Temple and swore, 'I will give him
unto the Lord all the days of his life.' Now, your mother
heard me read this story in church when you were only
a month old, and she thought of her little boy, and she
promised then and there that she would give her son unto
the Lord all the days of his life."

This was not a sermon for an eight-year-old ! No, this
was grown-up, and made Peter feel solemn and aged. He
glanced at his mother, who was still gazing out of the
window, as if she did not want to look into his eyes, and
was absently passing her hand over his head. There was
a sober stillness in the room, as if they were waiting for
organ music to begin.

"What shall I do for the Lord all the days of my life?"
asked Peter in confusion.

"That is what you must find out as you grow up," said
Peter's father. "That is what you are going to school for,
and when you are grown up, to college. And perhaps you

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will be a minister like your father, but perhaps you will
find other ways • • ."

There was much to think of here for Peter's head-
Peter's little head that was crammed with jolly thoughts
of apple trees and golden-rod and starfish, with scant
room for sober ideas. He had sometimes wished that his
father and mother did not care so much about him, that
they would let him run loose into the woods, like re^-
haired Mike's mother, who never knew where her boy
played all day long. But today all this about Samuel
made him rather proud.

Peter did not like to think of the time when he should
be grown up; why should he? Grown-up people were
always sitting at windows when children were playing in
the grass ; g^own-up people were always saying: "I haven*t
got the time," when children had all day to romp in — ^at
least in vacation and on Saturdays. To be sure, grown-
up people could stay up as late as they wanted, but, after
all, they usually Stayed up to write letters or read big,
heavy books. No, it would be much better never to grow
up at all. Now, there was Dick, who couldn't wait for the
time when he could be a sailor and sail over the sea all
the year round. Peter wondered if he would like to be a
^ilor too. It would be fine, surely, to stand in the wind
and look out over the wide, wide blue ! But the sea would
not always be blue; sometimes it would look cold and
gray, and there would be nothing to see far and wide but
gray sky and gray sea, and perhaps a few gulls flying. No,
Peter would not be a sailor. And, besides, how could he
serve the Lord far away on a ship? But there was no
other way, either, except the way of Peter's father, and
Peter could not think of himself as standing solemnly in

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THE PARSONAGE AND MIRA MARE

a pulpit, no, not fifty years from this day. Perhaps, after
all, there was some other way.

The doorbell rang. Peter's mother started up with a
fluttered air, and Peter's father stood rubbing his hands.
There was a wave of excitement in the air, something
like the hush before a sermon.

Lizzy came and announced Mr. Atherton.

"Show him in here, please," said Peter's mother, in lit-
tle more than a whisper.

Mr. Atherton came in, and Peter had never seen any-
one like Mr. Atherton. No doubt Peter's father and
mother had never seen anyone like Mr. Atherton, either,
and that was why they had seemed rather excited. It
was not because he was so very handsome, and his eyes
were so black and gleaming with light that you would not
dare to look straight into them ; it was not because of his
gay voice and musical, light way of laughing that Peter
felt almost giddy since Mr. Atherton had come into the
sober room ; it was because this stranger seemed to have
come from a far-away land, some dreamland, perhaps, in
a phantom ship ! Perhaps his home was on an island with
palm trees, where flowers grew all the year round, like
the island in "The Pirate's Paradise," that Dick had lent
Peter.

Mr. Atherton, after he had shaken hands with father
and mother, and Peter too, sat down in the chair that
really belonged to Peter's father, where, usually, no one
else dared to sit, and Peter's father and mother fixed
their eyes on him and listened hard. Peter did not know
what the stranger was talking about ; he used words that
Peter had never heard, and it seemed to him that Mr.
Atherton had some secret ways of talking that only a few

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chosen people, like Peter's father and mother, for in-
stance, could follow in a magic way — ^like the man in the
fairy tale, who said : "Open Sesame !" to the miraculous
mountain that understood.

"Dinner is served !" announced Lizzy.

Peter had quite forgotten that the moment of the Sun-
day ice-cream's arrival was near at hand^ so strong had
been the spell of this newcomer. And now he would sit
opposite the prince-like stranger all through the dinner
hour ! With a timid little voice, Peter's mother asked Mr.
Atherton to follow into the dining-room. There Peter
sat really face to face with the magical stranger and as
he looked up, his eyes met the bright, dazzling glance
of Mr. Atherton. The stranger smiled at him very kindly
and Peter felt bewitched.

"Little boy," said Mr. Atherton, "tell me what you
like best in all the world, beside your father and
mother?"

Oh, what a story-book question to ask, and how Peter
would have loved to give a bright, quick answer! But
there was nothing in his poor, silly head, and Mr.
Atherton's eyes were sparkling at him mischievously, and
Peter felt his cheeks grow very red.

"I — ^I don't know," he stammered. "Perhaps I know,
but I don't think I can tell just now."

"Peter will think about it for the rest of the day," said
his father, to help him out.

"When I was your age," the stranger went on, "I loved
a swan best of everything in the world — a swan on a
sluggish stream that flowed by our garden."

"A swan !" Peter echoed, dreamily. "A swan as white
as snow?"

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THE PARSONAGE AND MIRA MARE

"Yes," said the stranger, "white as snow, with the most
graceful, winding neck and a wicked beak."

"I love swans, too," said Peter. "There are some in
our town on the pond ; but I don't think I like them best
of everything in the world."

And as Peter mused over the black-eyed visitor and
the snow-white swan, his thoughts drifted away, and
when they landed in the dining-room again, after a voy-
age down silvery streams on the back of a docile white
swan, the conversation was once more a tangle of grown-
up topics in which little Peter could not find his way.
But now that there was nothing for him to hear, his eyes
were all the busier, jumping from Mr. Atherton to Peter's
mother, then to his father and back again to the absorb-
ing stranger. There was a big roast on the table, but
Peter's father, deep in talk, seemed to forget to carve,
holding the carving-knife and fork in air, and making
some aimless movements toward the patient roast, until
Peter's mother caught his eye with a nervous glance.
Then Peter looked slyly at Lizzie to see how she was
taking these unusual happenings, but Lizzy, though her
face looked long-suffering and a little sarcastic, was calm
enough in the presence of the rare Mr. Atherton. The
stranger spoke kindly, and there was really nothing about
him to make one afraid, although, to be sure, when the
ice-cream came, Peter did not dare to look too happy, lest
Mr. Atherton should think him a baby.

When they had all risen and followed Peter's mother
back into the library, Peter, who usually said good-by
at the threshold on similar occasions, lingered in the
room and watched the grown-up people drink their bitter
coffee.

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"You had better go out and play," said his mother, in a
low voice.

"Yes, I'm going to the beach with Dick and Harold,"
Peter replied, but stayed rooted to the floor. After all,
Dick and Harold he could see every day, but who knew
when Mr. Atherton would come again !

Mr. Atherton was looking at a big book with Peter's
father, who was pointing at a special place in it, and
seemed very serious. But when the book was laid aside,
the guest turned to Peter's mother and asked her in a gay
voice :

"Do you know my old friend, Mrs. Montague?"

Mrs. Montague ! That was Harold's mother, and Peter
was going to play on the beach beneath her house.

"I am going to play with Harold Montague right off,
now," cried the excited Peter.

"Then we may meet again," said Mr. Atherton, polite-
ly, as if Peter were a grown-up gentleman. "I am going
to call at — Mira Mare, I believe the house is called, later
on."

"Run along, Peter!" urged his mother, rather wor-
riedly, as if she were afraid that her silly little boy was
taking too much of the stranger's precious time.

But Peter was inspired with a sudden bold curiosity.

"I want to ask Mr. Atherton a question/' he said,
flushing with excitement, while his mother's mild gray-
blue eyes looked somewhat shocked and alarmed.

"I'll answer it, if I can," said Mr. Atherton, with that
same beautiful politness.

"What is a genius?" Peter burst out

Then Peter's father, though he was the Reverend Mr.
Loring, and in a solemn mood today, laughed loudly.

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THE PARSONAGE AND MIRA MARE

"Well," said Mr. Atherton, with a jolly twitch of his
moustache and a brilliant light in his eyes : "Do you know
the story of the Ugly Little Duckling?"

"Yes, I know that," said Peter, proud that he did not
have to say no.

"Well, a genius," explained Mr. Atherton, "is an ugly
little duckling that is sure to turn into a swan."

"A swan !" cried Peter. "A swan again !"

"That will give you something to think about for the
rest of the day," said Peter's father, meaning that Peter
was dismissed, and as his mother's eyes g^ew more en-
treating, Peter said good-by reluctantly, though there was
now still a hope of meeting Mr. Atherton again in the
afternoon.

Then he rushed upstairs to put on his play-clothes, and
with his Sunday suit Peter dropped all his solemnity, too,
and the sense of awe and wonder inspired by the stranger
in the house. The sunshine was beckoning at the win-
dow, and Peter ran out and skipped down the road till he
came to the little white house where Dick lived, and there
he banged with the knocker on the door.

"Dick couldn't wait," said Dick's jolly, round-faced
mother. "He's gone to Harold's, and said you should find
them on the beach."

Off Peter skipped again, and walked briskly through
the quiet town, where the houses seemed as if they were
taking naps, and only once in a while some friend of his
father's would pass by in a tall silk hat. Peter came to
the road that ran along a marshy arm of the sea, then
walked over the causeway to Green Shore, where the
summer cottagers lived. Because it was late in Septem-
ber many of the houses were deserted, and only an old

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fisherman was sauntering down the road. All the wilder
the shaggy barberry bushes looked in the solitude, as the
north wind blew on them roughly, above the sharp gray
rocks. The sea was Peter's favorite deep blue today, and
the sunshine made the ripples golden, and the town across
the marshy arm of the sea looked white and cheerful, like
a toy town. There were some sails far out at sea, and
two tall masts were towering above the trees that hid the
harbor of the town from Peter's view. Happy, happy the
boy who could play on the beach on such a day ! Peter
jumped high into the air from joy, and ran against the
wind to Mira Mare, the house of Harold Montague's
mother. The house really deserved such a fanciful for-
eign name, which, as Harold had told him, meant "Look
at the Sea!" because it was something like a castle built
high on a rock, very white in the sunlight, with a great,
liigh veranda. Harold's mother was on the piazza with
another lady, but Peter did not want her to see him, be-
cause it was silly to waste good sunshine on polite talk
with ladies, when one might be playing on the beach;
and, too, because he was just a little afraid of Harold's
mother.

So Peter flew down the stairs that were cut in the rocks
beneath Mira Mare down to the long beach, where Dick
and Harold stopped playing ball when they saw him
coming. Then they all took off their shoes and stockings
to explore among the rocks.

To feel the ice-cold water creeping over one's bare feet,
to skip from one low rock to another, playing hide-and-seek
with the water ; to slide on the slippery, leathery seaweed ;
to lean against the pointed barnacles of a tall rock while
the wind was piping in one's ear — ^that was life indeed to

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iPeter I He and Dick had looked for starfish many, many
times, but each time the quest was a novel adventure. In
the first place, the tide was quite surprisingly low at this
hour today, so that some little rocks emerged into the
sunlight that usually stayed tucked in their watery bed;
then there was a big horseshoe crab, a rare guest, swim-
ming away in the pool between the great cliff and the
cluster of rocks on the beach, as gaily as if he swam there
every day of his life. Peter and Dick crawled on over
seaweed and barnacles, slipping into the cold water, so
that it splashed, dodging sharp-clawed crabs that lurked
among the pebbles like sly thieves, capturing the meek,
curling starfish on their way — ^till they came to their
favorite nook, that could be reached only at the lowest
tide, the deep, secret pool beneath the greatest of the
boulders. Peter and Dick kn^lt each on a cold, wet stone
and looked down into the pool; a wonderful land was
there, a fairy land of the ocean I Sea anemones grew on
the side of the rock, open like real flowers in bloom, and
the white periwinkles and limpets gleamed like gems ; the
rock bottom of the clear, still pool shone red and green,
and little green crabs were gliding over it swiftly ; purple-
gray starfish lay quite still beside glistening bits of silvery
mother-of-pearl. All at once, into the smooth peace-
ful pool a little fish glided like a black shadow, and out
again. Peter watched, enchanted ; this must be the cool,
shining home of the young mermaid with glistening scales
and seaweed hair, where she sang to her little fishes at
dusk, when no boys could spy upon her, and she made
ripples in the water with a mother-of-pearl fan. Per-
haps, some night, she would leave a pearl in a crevice
there with the shells and Peter would find it.

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"Say, I've got a sand-doUar!** Harold's voice startled
Peter out of his reverie.

There was Harold, working his way toward them,
clutching the long, brown streamers of seaweed, and with
the other hand guarding his precious sand-dollar.

"You never found a sand-dollar in your life I" he
boasted, when he had reached them, as he held out the
flat, gray disk on his hand.

"Oh, I found one last night," said Dick mischievously.
"And that didn't have a chip ofif at the edge, either, like
this one."

"You did not find one. Anyway, I bet you didn't find
one as good as this," cried Harold, in a temper. In his
excitement he stamped his bare foot on the seaweed,
slipped, and as he grasped hold of the nearest rock for
support, dropped the precious sand-dollar into the pool.
Peter laughed heartily: now the mermaid would find a
pretty gray sand-dollar when she slipped into her pool
tonight!

"You can laugh,'* sulked Harold. "I'm going home I"
And he crept away.

"Isn't he silly?" said Peter to Dick.

"I should say so," said Dick to Peter. "Let him go
home. The water's getting mighty cold, though. Let's
catch our starfish and go back, too."

The water was icy, indeed, in the puddles between the
rocks, and even the stones began to feel very cold to
bare feet. Besides, the wind was growing rougher and
whipping up little white-capped waves, not at all like the
calm pools beneath the sheltering boulders. So Peter and
Dick, when each had tied a party of wiggling starfish into
his handkerchief, wound their way back to the beach, and

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after running about in the warm sand to dry their f eet^
put on again their sober shoes and stockings. Harold^
who had been lacing his shoes when they came, turned
round at the foot of the steps in the rocks, and said
sulkily:

"Mamma wants you two to come up on the piazza!"
Then he climbed up the steps.

Peter made a wry face, and Dick pouted.

"What does she want us for?" said Peter. "I don't
like her, do you?"

Dick shook his head.

"Perhaps she's got some candy, though," he said, with
a sudden skip, whereupon they both sauntered up the
steps.

The wind was now roaring about Mint Mare and made
it seem more than ever like a castle by the sea. With his
heart fluttering a little, as it always did before he talked
to Harold's proud, gorgeous mother, Peter walked ahead
of Dick up the steep stairway that led to the high
veranda.

"Here they are !" cried Harold's voice at the top of the
stairs. His sulkiness had blown away, and he stood grin-
ning at the side of no one less than Mr. Atherton.

"Ah, my young friend," the genius said, in his polite
way, "you have had some conversation with the sea-wind,
to judge by your cheeks."

Conversation with the wind ! That wasn't the way the
people whom Peter knew talked, but he liked it and said :

"Yes, and it was loud, too."

"We've been running on the beach," said Dick, who
was never afraid of anybody, not even the rare Mr. Ather-
ton, and with the big, blue eyes in his round, ruddy face

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looked merrily up at the stranger. "And then we looked
for starfish."

Dick untied his handkerchief and showed the heap of
poor, limp starfish to Mr. Atherton, who made a face as
if he did not like them very well.

"They look rather out of their element," he said.

"I don't know what you mean," said Dick — ^and no
wonder, for Peter himself did not understand.

"I mean," explained Mr. Atherton, "that they look as
if they would be much happier in the water."

"I guess they would be," said Dick. "Perhaps I'll take
them back on my way home."

— "Ah, here are the children !" That was Mrs. Mon-
tague's high, cold voice, and Harold's mother swept over
to them in her grand, startling way, and behind followed
Harold's heavy father, with a face something like a bull-
dog's, who never said more than three words, so that
people seemed to forget all about him. Peter always felt
a chill when Mrs. Montague came near him, even though
the ladies that called on his mother called her a great
beauty. She had fishy g^een eyes, like Harold's, and a
very fair skin and smooth, brown hair like his, and today
she wore a dress that was glistening sea-green, and there
were sparkling gems at her ears and her wrists, and
everything about her seemed to sparkle. Besides, she
brought candy in a silver dish — Peter's favorite kind, too,
with cherries — for him and for Dick, and that made the
proud lady seem kinder.

"I called you, Peter," she said, in her chilly voice "be-
cause there is a lady here, a friend of your mother's, who
wants to see you again."

Peter was excited enough to see Mr. Atherton again,

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and now Mrs. Montague had another friend of his moth-
er's in store for him, and one who really wanted to see
Peter. Who could that be — and a lady, too I

'^ In the next moment Peter stood before the beautiful

lady of his grandmother's garden.

"Do you remember me?" she said, in her voice like low
music, as she bent down to him and took Peter's hand.
Did he remember her ! For a moment he was in the gar-
den again, his grandmother's garden, ablaze with blood-
red poppies, and he saw the fairy-child with the sunlit
curls and the queenly lady with her clear, sea-gray eyes by
the garden wall — and the moment afterwards he saw only
the poppies, one glowing, laughing red.

"What are you thinking of, Peter?" Harold's mother
asked, with a laugh that chased Peter's vision away.

"I don't know," said Peter, stupidly. How could he
tell the truth to Harold's mother : she did not make him
think of red poppies at all — she made him think of some-
thing snaky and green.

But the beautiful lady of the poppies said : "I believe he
was thinking of his grandmother's garden."

"Yes, I was," said Peter, and he was happy again.

"Virginia and I have come to live in GuUport," the
beautiful lady went on. "And I hope you and she will
play together often, and Dick, too," she added, like a
Queen who was kind to everyone.

And Peter wanted to laugh because he was so joyful,
and to hop and skip— if only Mrs. Montague had not been
staring at him with her cold green eyes. But he did
laugh, after all.

"You have some secret," said Mr. Atherton. "Let us
laugh, too, Peter I"

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"It's only — '* Peter began slowly, and then cried out
suddenly, as if an idea had just shot into his mind : "I can
tell you now what I like best in all the worid— outside of
my father and mother."

"What is it?" asked Mr. Atherton, with a curious smile.

And Peter said: "Red poppies!"

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CHAPTER III

THE BIRTHDAY WISH

THE sun was just going to set, the great golden-red
fireball, between the long fleecy rows of deep red
clouds ; the sky was a sea of crimson that turned purple
at the horizon.

"PlaybaUr

Peter was on the field playing "scrub" with the other
boys, and it was his turn to bat.

There was a magic light in the air that made the trees
and the grass seem greener than by day.

"Strike oner

The sun had begun to dip beneath the lower cloud, and
it was almost blood-red now; and there was orange in
the sky, a bright, glowing orange

"Strike two!"

Oh, Peter must not look at the sky any more : he had
only one more chance to hit the ball. Just a glance,
though, while the catcher picked up the ball and threw
it to Ted, the pitcher.

The sun was almost down, only a tiny slice, like a little
flame gleamed above the cloud that was now purple-blue.
And spread out beneath the cloud there was a film of
lovely rose-light

"Strike three— out!"

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Peter started: he did not know that he had struck at
aU!

"You didn't even look at the ball!'* jeered Red Mike
from first base. "You was lookin' at the sky !**

Peter made a sheepish face as he dropped the bat and
slouched meekly out to the field. A peal of laughter
burst on his ears.

"Peter, Peter,
Pumpkin-eater!"

Thus sang all the boys and made a great hullabaloo
till Peter wished the ground would open and swallow him.
Well, he wouldn't even glance at the clouds with the cor-
ner of his eye while the game was going on, and the next
time his turn to the bat came he would knock the ball
over the roof of the house behind the field.

"Gee. There's a dandy!'*

Joe Nutter had hit a fly — ^way up high it flew, like a
bird. Peter rushed forward, then ran backwards a few
little steps — and the ball was in his hand.

"Good work ! Good for you, Peter !" the boys shouted
round him. These were pleasant words to his ears, and
the sunset was avenged.

Joe Nutter, nicknamed "Noodles," tramped heavily up
to the field.

"Hello, Noodles!" cried Peter. "Come on, you be
shortstop and I'll get the flies • . ."

"Oh, nothing doing!" Noodles replied. "Tim's at the
bat. He hits more fouls — ^hello, what's up?"

"Tim's going home to dinner." "It's getting too dark to
play, anyway!" "My people had their supper long ago!"
Thus shouted the general breaking up, and Peter remem-

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THE BIRTHDAY WISH

bered that his mother had told him especially to come
home on time tonight.

So Peter walked home with Dick in the fragrant May
night They met many passers-by : fishermen coming home
from their boats and townspeople returning from picnics
or just strolling up and down in front of their houses to
taste the fine air. Everywhere they saw the windows wide
open, and in almost every house someone was leaning
out of a window ; and all along their way the lovely scent
of late lilacs rose from the gardens. Dick and Peter never
said a word, so tired were they both from playing, and
lulled into a happy drowsiness.

Sleepy as he was, Peter went to bed very early, glad
that he had done the hated arithmetic lesson before he
had gone out to play ball — done it in a way, though he
knew that it was the wrong way. And he coaxed Lizzy
to call him at six in the morning and give him breakfast
while his father and mother were still asleep, because he
wanted to carry out a long-cherished plan of taking a
long walk in the woods before school. So with eager
thoughts of the morning he fell into a deep sleep.

A loud knock at the door ! What, was it time to get up
so soon, when dreams were still so enchanting? Peter
rubbed his eyes. Oh^ this was the morning of his adven-
ture, of his secret flight into the woods! No more
dreams now, but swift dressing and a rush for the
kitchen, where Lizzy in a cheerful mood gave him milk
and cereal, and put an orange into his pocket.

Away now, away into the green, waking world ! The
horrid black bag with the arithmetic book and his note-
books in it he would have liked to leave at home, but, un-
happily, there was school at the end of his morning's

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journey. Peter's heart leaped with joy as he slipped out
of the back door: the sunshine was all his own in this
early morning hour, and the robins were singing for him
alone. There was a big, stout robin on the grass now, wet-
ting his feet with the dew, for pearls of dew were twink-
ling here and there. The lilac bushes were moist and cool
and fragrant when Peter buried his face in their blossoms,
and the blooming apple tree was like one giant flower.
But as there was no time to linger in the yard, Peter
walked briskly through the quiet streets, skipping now
and then from joy at nearing the woods.

"Hallo, sir; up pretty early today!" That was the
milkman's greeting from his cart.

"Yes, I'm going into the woods," said Peter, and
skipped along.

The woods were not very far, not much farther than
the schoolhouse, which was at the outskirts of the town,
and Peter had roamed and played in them often — ^but
never in this early morning hour. After all, it was
nothing so wonderful to take a walk in the woods
before school, and yet Peter felt a thrill as he
entered them, as if he were setting out on some
great adventure and expected something marvelous
to happen. He walked along the path with light green
beeches on either side and silvery birch trees, and now
and then a big pine or hemlock tree. The ground was
moist and from it rose a spicy smell of roots and leaves
and all the good things of the wood. Peter turned
aside into a narrow path that led into the denser parts,
where cedar trees grew and more pines and where the
underbrush was thick. There was a clearing somewhere
in this direction with a view of the sea.

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There it was — ^but, Oh, someone else had found it be-
fore him ! Who could that man be — ^what was he doing
there, standing in front of a two-legged, wooden stand,
holding a big, flat piece of wood in his hand, like an oval
wooden plate ! The woods had opened and behind the trees
the sea gleamed a wonderful deep blue and the sunlight
threw golden spots on the ground. Peter rejoiced that he
was here, with his eyes open, and not in bed. But what had
brought that strange man here, too, and what could he
be doing, standing stiffly in front of that wooden stand,
moving only his arm? Could it be some one taking
pictures with a camera? But that would not take him
so long a time in one place. Peter must go nearer
and see.

On the queer wooden thing stood a picture, indeed, but
not a camera picture — b. painted picture, like those in Mrs.
Montague's house, and the man was painting on it with a
long, flat brush. There on the picture were the black trees
and the gleaming blue sea behind them, and the golden
sunspots on the rich, dark ground — all beautiful ; as good
as the real trees, the real sun, the real sea ! Peter stood
enchanted behind the strange man, very quietly, so that
he could watch unnoticed. On the flat, wooden plate,
which had a hole on one end for the painter's thumb, were
little pools of color — red, green, yellow, blue, brown, and
some purplish, some a queer old rose, some muddy gray,
and one great snaky mass of white ; and the man dipped
his brush first into one pool of color, then into another,
and made alluring mixtures on the plate. Then he
would whip the picture with his brush and make deli-
cate changes of color on the sunspots upon the ground.
Peter had never seen anyone paint before. He had

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a tiny paint-box himself, but there were only red and
blue and yellow in it, and he had colored pictures in pic-
ture-books, and had even made little drawings of his
own that he had colored afterwards — ^but all that was
very different from making the sea and the woods and
the sunlight over again with a big brush.

The painter turned round and looked at Peter with
sharp, bright blue eyes, like a fisherman's ; his face looked
ruddy and rough, with a wild grizzly moustache, and the
hair under his slouch hat was shaggy and gray. What an
adventure, to be in the woods alone in the early morning
and meet a man who looked like a pirate and had the
touch of a wizard !

"Well, boy, d'you know what you see in this picture
here?" he asked, in a gruff voice.

"I guess I know, all right,'* cried Peter, highly honored
to be addressed. "I never saw anything so wonderful. I
wish I could do isomething like that."

"Why don't you learn?" said the wizard, dipping his
brush into a little can of muddy green fluid that was at-
tacked to the wooden plate.

"Learn!" cried Peter, excited. "Can one learn to do
that?"

"One can't learn to paint well,'* said the strange man.
"But one can learn to paint somehow."

"But can a boy learn to make a picture like that one?**
asked Peter, impatiently.

"That depends," said the painter, squinting at the trees
through a round hole made with two fingers. "It depends
on whether you've got it in you."

Peter felt his cheeks grow red and heard his heart
beat.

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"D'you suppose," he cried, "that I've got it in me?'*

The busy stranger stopped an instant to look at Peter
more kindly than before.

"Perhaps you have," he said. "You can't tell till you
try. I've got a boy that could paint quite decent when he
was ten."

"Ten !" cried Peter, in a rush of jealousy. "Why, I'm
most ten now. Why can't I do the same?"

"Perhaps you never tried," said the painter, not in the
least excited, and stroked the sea on his picture with a flat,
shining knife.

"I haven't got a paint-box like that," said Peter, wist-
fully.

"My boy didn't have, either," the stranger replied. "He
had water colors at your age, and when he wanted to paint
oil, he used my old tubes."

"But my paint-box has only red and blue and yellow
— ^and black," Peter complained. "And it's only meant
for coloring picture-books, and Dick — ^that's a friend of
mine — said I was too old to play with a paint-box like
that."

"Perhaps your folks will give you another one," the
stranger suggested, and that idea set Peter's soul on fire.
His birthday came in June, and what was a birthday for,
but to have one's dearest wish fulfilled? If only his
father and mother would understand how much he really
wanted a new paint-box !

"How old was your boy," he asked, anxiously, "when
he painted the very first time?"

"Seven, I guess," the painter answered absently. "Or
eight." These careless words stung Peter to the depth of
his heart ; a jealous pang almost drove tears into his eyes.

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"What made him try so young?" he asked. "No boys
I know paint at all/'

"He saw his dad do it all the time," said the painter.
"So he wanted to try, too."

"My father and mother never paint," Peter complained.
"They never think about it at all."

To that the painter made no reply, and Peter watched
him a few minutes in silence, as the sea grew brighter
under his brush.

"Where's your boy now?" Peter asked, thinking that
the son of this gtuff wizard of the woods might make a
good playfellow, even though he was jealous of one so
far ahead.

"He's in Boston, at school,'* the painter replied.

"Oh, why doesn't he go to school here?" asked Peter,
astonished.

"Because there is no art school here," the painter an-
swered, in a tone as if he meant to say : "What a foolish
question !"

"Art school," Peter repeated, lingeringly, as if there
were a mystery in those words. His father, now and
then in a sermon, had spoken of "art and music" always
together, as if these two were sisters, and his mother had
called the pictures in Mrs. Montague's house "works of
art." But an art school . . .

"Is an art school a place where you learn to paint?" he
asked, timidly.

"That's what it is," the painter answered. "To
draw and to paint and to model — anything along that
line."

"I'd like to go to art school !" said Peter wistfully.

"Should you?" said the strange man, absently, for he

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THE BIRTHDAY WISH

was now scraping off a white cloud from the sky and put-
ting on more blue, very quickly and deftly.

There was truly a glorious light now that made the sea
gleam with dazzling gold. Peter was very happy here
alone with this strange man of the woods, who was catch-
ing the sunshine and the gleam of the sea for his picture.
There was no sound but the rustle of leaves and the
mufHed murmur of the tide.

All at once, breaking through the silence, bells rang
clear and loud and brisk.

"Oh, dear!' cried Peter, waking out of his reverie,
"That's the nine o'clock bell ! I'm late for school."

"You'd better run !" said the painter, calmly.

"I don't care if I am late," Peter declared. "I'd rather
stay here."

"You can come again," said the strange man gruffly,
without looking up from his work.

"Oh, how fine !" cried Peter, jumping from joy. "Are
you going to be here tomorrow?"

"I guess so," the painter mumbled. "If the light's the
same."

"Then I'll come," said Peter. "Gk)od-by."

Reluctantly Peter tore himself away and strolled off
to school. It was so late already that a few minutes
more or less would make no difference, and besides, the
more he missed of the arithmetic lesson, the better.

The hall of the schoolhouse was hushed, and from
behind closed doors came the sounds of reciting voices.
When Peter, with a grand air of indifference, walked into
the room of his grade, all the boys and girls looked up,
and some laughed and nudged each other, and some
winked at him saucily.

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Miss Rose Bangs, the teacher, stopped short in her
demonstration at the blackboard and faced Peter with
an impatient frown.

"Peter Loring," she s^id, sternly, "this is the third time
you've been late this week. I want you to stay after
school. I want to speak to you.*'

What did Peter care ! He would speak to Miss Bangs
ten times after school for one early morning hour with
the strange man in the woods.

"Yes, Miss Bangs, here's my lesson," he said, calmly,
pulling his papers out of the little green bag, and laid
them on the desk.

The children were staring at Peter with admiration as
he took his seat, while Miss Bangs turned back to the
blackboard. It seemed that the class was engaged in a
long, complicated division, and Peter did not know what
the teacher was talking about. Miss Bangs looked very
funny, bobbing her head up and down in her excitement
over the stupid division, and appearing shocked when
somebody made a mistake. Her nose had such a funny
point, and her chin was queer and pointed, too, and her
yellow curls seemed very comical today. Peter pulled
a sheet of paper and a pencil out of his bag and began
to draw : there was Miss Bangs now, on the paper, her
nose much longer and more pointed, her chin queerer,
and her curls wilder than those of the real Miss Bangs
— 2L "caricature," as Harold had called pictures in news-
papers that made people look funnier than they really
were. Peter had to laugh at his own drawing, as he
wrote "Miss Rose Bangs" beneath it in flourishing let-
ters. Whom could he draw now? He looked about —
Oh, there was Mike, with his red hair sticking up like

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quills on a porcupine and his nose tilting upward. A few
strokes, and there was Red Mike, too, beside Miss Bangs,
alive and funny, except that the carroty color of his hair
was lacking to make the picture complete.

"Peter Loring, what will you do with the remainder?"
Miss Bangs's thin voice piped from the blackboard.

Peter started.

"I don't know," he said, sheepishly.

"What have you been writing there?" Miss Bangs
asked, severely.

"I haven't been writing," said Peter. "I've been draw-
ing pictures."

Thereupon a burst of laughter from the whole class
greeted Peter, and Ted RafHes beside him snatched the
paper with the wicked drawing from Peter's desk, and
chuckling gave it to the boy in front of him, and so it was
passed on, among the loud laughter of the boys and the
choked giggling of the girls. Peter was lost, but he didn't
care. Somehow, he didn't care what happened to him
after his beautiful adventure of the morning, because
everything else seemed so much smaller, of less import-
ance. But when Miss Bangs was coming dangerously
near the desk that her mischievous portrait had reached
by this time, Peter began to tremble, not for his own
fate, but for poor Miss Bangs. If she should see her
nose — ^and her chin ! Any other day he would have rel-
ished the excitement of such a scene, but today, when he
himself was so happy from that magic sunny hour in the
woods, he wanted everyone else to rejoice too — even Miss
Bangs. So when with a glance he saw that the paper had
now landed in the hands of Dick, he cried in a frantic
stage-whisper :

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"Tear it up, Dick ! Tear it up !"

Dick turned round sharply, caught Peter's eye, and in
a twinkling had torn the harmful paper into shreds, just
before Miss Bangs had come to snatch it

Peter gave a sigh of relief. In his excitement he had
risen from his chair, and now he sank back in placid con-
tent, for Miss Bangs had not seen her nose.

"Peter Loring," the rescued victim said, never guessing
what she had escaped, "by your mischief you have made
the whole class unruly today. I can't have that go on.
Now you go to the blackboard immediately !"

The bladcboard ! Peter slouched up to it as slowly as
possible, and dropped his piece of chalk, but these delays
were of small use. When he held the chalk firmly at last,
his hand ached to draw another portrait of Miss Bangs,
a big one on the blackboard, to the cheers of the class, but
he refrained and toiled wearily through the long dry divi-
sion. He had just lost his way in a sickening wilderness
of numbers when the bell rang with its welcome clang.

The next hour was English, and that was really pleas-
ant, after the arithmetic, as they were reading "The Won-
derbook," and had just began the strange story of "Pan-
dora and Her Marvelous Box." After English and re-
cess came geography, in which Peter had to tell Miss
Bangs what the boundaries of Europe were, and as he
forgot only one sea at the bottom, that was not so bad,
either.

And now the time had come for a moral talk from Miss
Bangs. Peter let all the children leave the schoolroom,
even Dick, to whom he whispered laughingly once more,
as he had done in recess: "You saved my life, Dick."
Then he walked up to the desk with a light heart, for he

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could not be downcast today, and with mischievous eyes
looked at Miss Bangs, who stood before him, sober and
severe.

"Now no fooling," she said sharply. "You know you
were very naughty in arithmetic today."

"I know," said Peter, and his eyes twinkled as he
thought of Miss Bangs's portrait. "But I hate arithmetic
and I love to draw pictures."

"That's all the more reason," said Miss Bangs, grandly,
"why you should try hard to do arithmetic."

"I suppose so," Peter replied, and then he remembered
something that his father had once said in the pulpit,
which he repeated now with a noble sigh: "But we all
have our faults."

Peter did not understand why Miss Bangs, who had
tried to be so very serious all the time while he felt gay,
should now break out into a sudden funny little laugh,
just at the point when he was beginning to be sober.

"Well, try to mend yours, anyway," Miss Bangs said
quickly, without looking at him, and began to pack her
bag. When Peter stayed and waited, she looked up has-
tily, and said :

"That'll do. Good-by."

When Peter came home, he found that his mother had
been anxious because he had flown away secretly so early
in the morning, and her tone was reproachful. But when
Peter told her about the strange man in the woods, she
smiled :

"Has he got a rough, straggly moustache and gray
hair?" she asked.

"Yes, that's just the way he looks!" cried Peter, skip-
ping with excitement. "Do you know him?"

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"Why, that's Mr. Woodfin/' she replied. "Of course I
know him."

The idea of his mother's knowing the wizard of the
wood ! Peter was ahnost disappointed at being robbed of
his mystery, but on the other hand, he now had a chance
to inquire about the stranger.

"Have you always known him?" he asked. "Where
does he live? Why didn't you ever speak about him?"

"To tell the truth," said Peter's mother, "I haven't
been thinking about him for the last two years — I never
see him. He doesn't like people very well, and he goes oflf
for days with the fishermen and paints in harbors and
on islands. His wife went to our church, and while she
lived I used to see him once in a while, but since her
death he has been more and more of a hermit, and nobody
dares to trouble him."

"What's a hermit?" asked Peter.

"A man who lives alone, away from other people,"
answered his mother.

"Oh !" was all that Peter said, but he felt more drawn
to the wild man of the woods than ever, especially as it
was a hermit, some one quite different from everyday
folks, thlat he had come upon in his adventure.

"He lives in a little cottage at the edge of the woods, on
the Porter Street side," Peter's mother went on. "All
alone. Only by day an old woman comes and sweeps his
room and cooks his meals for him — so they say."

"His son is in art school in Boston," said Peter, proud
of his information.

"Did he tell you that?" asked his mother, surprised.

And when Peter nodded, she said : "That was a great
deal of talk from him."

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To think that a wild man of the woods, a hermit,
should have singled out Peter as the one live creature to
whom he talked in the wide world ! The whole day Pe-
ter's thoughts rushed back to the painter in the woods,
Mr. Woodfin — ^what a strangely apt name, too! — ^and
whatever he did that day, whether playing in the yard
with Dick, or studying his lesson, or eating dinner, he
was always really standing behind the wonderful stranger,
watching the pine trees grow dark and the sea gleaming
blue, and the sunspots golden under the painter's hands.

"You're not listening to what I'm saying,'* Peter heard
his father say at dinner.

"I?" he asked, starting from his blissful meditation.

"Yes," his father replied. "You, of course. Your
mother always listens and I listen to her. But Master
Peter is not in the dining-room; I think we must look for
him somewhere in the clouds."

It was queer how Peter never felt like laughing when
his father said something that was meant to be funny,
perhaps because his moist and kindly eyes always looked
as if he were sorry for somebody.

So Peter didn't laugh, but answered seriously :

"I wasn't in the clouds. I was thinking what I'd like
for my birthday."

For Peter's birthday was coming very soon in the next
month.

"I thought you wanted 'Robinson Crusoe,' " said his
father.

"But I want something else much more now," said
Peter, turning red with excitement.

"You look as if it were something impossible," re-
marked his mother.

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"No, it's not impossible," Peter declared.
'^Well — ?*' asked his mother, looking a little frightened,
] as if he were going to ask her for a pet giraffe.

I "It's a paint-box !" Peter announced.

1 "A paint-box," repeated his father, puzzled "Why a

paint-box?"
"Besides, you've got one," said his mother.
1 "Oh, but mother !" Peter exclaimed, "that's only a baby

one. I want a real one, with all the colors in it"

"I'm sure it was Mr. Woodfin that gave you that idea,"
said Peter's mother.

Peter grew still redder in the face: of course it was

1 Mr. Woodfin who had made him want a new paint-box,

but Peter didn't like to admit it. Although his mother

knew more about Mr. Woodfin than he did, Peter liked

to think of the painter as his own secret

Peter was impatient for the morning, when he would
get up early again and slip off into the woods to see his
1 painter once more — ^if "the light was the same," as Mr.

Woodfin had said. But unhappily Peter woke up the next
day to the beat of rain on the roof, and when he looked
out of the window he saw that a mist screened even the
house across the road from his view. The light was not
"the same," surely, and there would be no painter this
morning in the woods. The next day the sky gave no
greater hope, and a fine drizzling rain, with only short,
fitful intervals of sunshine, lasted throughout the week.

On the first day of June, however, in the course of the
morning, while Peter was at school glancing wistfully
out of the window every few minutes, the sun came out
brightly to stay, and Peter's heart leaped as he thought
of the joy in store for him the next morning. When

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THE BIRTHDAY WISH

school was over, Peter took a roundabout way home and
came to the edge of the woods. Whom should he meet
there — Oh, just as he had hoped that he would — but Mr.
Woodfin himself, walking home with his wooden stand
and the plate with the colors and a box, all strapped
together, in one hand, and the beautiful picture in the
other, held at some distance from him because the paint
was still moist.

Peter was so happy that he could not speak.

"Hallo, my boy," the painter began, "where are you
going?"

"Home," said Peter. "Wasn't it too bad it rained so?
But you're going to the same place tomorrow morning,
aren't you?"

The man of the woods shook his head.

"That there's done," he said, nodding at the picture in
his hand.

Peter's heart stood still: no more early mornings
in the woods with his painter, when he had tasted only
one !

"But aren't you going to start another picture?" he
asked, cheered by the hope of a still lovelier place, per-
haps deeper in the woods, or on the beach, or at the
harbor, where he would go and seek the painter before
school.

"Yes," said Mr. Woodfin, "I'm going on a cruise on a
fishing schooner. I want to do some harbor sketches."

Peter felt that horrid tears had rushed into his eyes,
and because he was afraid that Mr. Woodfin might see
them he turned and winked at the sea, as if he were
watching for a boat on the horizon.

"How long will you be gone on the cruise?" he asked.

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"Three or four weeks, I guess," said Mr. Woodfin.

"So long?" Peter cried out in bitter disappointment.
"Oh, how I wish I was going!"

"Perhaps you'll go, too, some day," said the painter,
with a gruflF laugh, "when your ma'll let you. Good luck
to you, boy !"

He turned round to march off with his treasure.

"Let me look at the picture!" cried Peter, and the
painter left him take a last long look at the trees and the
sea and the sun spots of gold.

"That is grand !" was all Peter could say.

Mr. Woodfin laughed and stroked his wild-looking
moustache.

"Enough !" he said, and turned the picture round.

Then he marched off and was out of sight in the woods.

Peter could not rejoice in the sunshine that made the
rain drops glisten on the grass ; he did not look at the dai-
sies in the field any more than if they had been weeds ;
he was disappointed and angry and sad. He was late
for lunch, because of his long way home, and after listen-
ing to his mother's well-known, "Why, Peter, you must
come on time !'* in silence, he sullenly ate alone.

In the afternoon he said to his mother in the most "by
the way" manner that he could affect :

"Mr. Woodfin is going on a cruise for three or four
weeks."

"Did he tell you so?" she asked. "Where did you see
him?"

"On the way from school," said Peter.

"I suppose he is going to make sketches from the
ports," his mother remarked, but she seemed much more
absorbed in the lilies of the valley that she was arrang-

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ing in an ugly green vase than in Mr. Woodfin and his
paintings.

''Gro and put on a clean collar/' she said, as if collars
mattered to a boy who was unhappy. "If some of the
ladies should see you, I would want you to look
reputable."

Today was his mother's afternoon at home, when ladies
in their gay summer hats would come tripping in one by
one, and sit in the parlor and drink tea with lemon in it,
and eat little sandwiches and cakes, and talk fast and call
everything "perfectly charming." Peter knew all about
it, because he had listened behind the parlor door.

Somehow he didn't feel like playing with Dick this
afternoon, even though it was the first of June and a
long-desired day of sunshine ; but he would rather climb
into the apple tree and think about how sad it was that
Mr. Woodfin should be going away for so long, just when
Peter had set his heart on beautiful hours with him in the
summer mornings. So when Peter had put on a brand
new collar for the ladies that might see him, he climbed
into the big round apple tree that still wore many blos-
soms, though it was June today ; some were scattered on
the grass in the yard, and even a few on to the sidewalk
on the other. side of the fence. From his favorite seat
on a queer twisted branch, with another bough to lean
against, just like the back of a sofa, Peter could watch
the callers come into the yard, as if he were spying from
a tower.

The town clock had struck four, when the great stately
door of the house opposite swung open, and out stepped
Mrs. Grimshaw, tall, lean, dressed in black, like a long,
thin shadow against the white house. Now Peter forgot

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his sorrow just for a momeiit to wonder if she were going
out to call on his mother — she didn't have very far to go,
surely. Mrs. Grimshaw lingered on her doorsteps and
looked round and sniffed the air, then walked straight out
of her jrardy crossed the street and opened the gate in
the fence, right under Peter's apple tree. She had the
same dreary, discontented look that the Grimshaws always
wore, and never guessed that she was being watched from
the apple tree till she was safe inside the Loring house.

Next came Mrs. Goddard, the wife of "the other doc-
tor," and, therefore, disliked by Peter. "The other doc-
tor" was the doctor who wasn't Dick's father, and some
people, for instance Mrs. Grimshaw when she had rheu-
matism, called gloomy, severe Dr. Goddard instead of Dr.
Taylor who was kind and jolly and brought you little sur-
prises when you had the measles. And now Mrs. God-
dard came prancing into the jrard, stiff and cold, with a
little brown spring hat which was not the least bit gay.

As for gay hats, Peter had to laugh, for there came
Harold's mother driving her little electric car, and then
strutting into the yard, proud as a peacock. She was
dressed all in green again, a light green suit and a hat with
high green feathers that bobbed up and down in the
breeze. She stopped to look back at her car almost under
Peter's throne on the branches, and now he wished
that his tree bore apples instead of blossoms, so that he
might drop a big round one neatly on to Mrs. Montague's
feathers. How she would start and look round, and —
Well, there was no apple, and Harold's mother strutted
into the house. Who would come next? This game of
watchman in the tower was really good fun, even if one
played with a heavy heart

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Who was coming down the street far oflF, coming
nearer now — z grown lady with two children? The lady
was tall and walked slowly, and a little girl was skip-
ping at either side. Oh, yes, Peter could see now that
it was Mrs. Grey and that one of the children was
Virginia.

Peter could not help laughing in his heart whenever he
saw the beautiful lady of the garden, even though he saw
her often, now that she was living in GuUport, for he
could not help seeing again with the bright eye of his
mind the glorious red poppies that had bloomed so long
ago. It was wicked of Peter, surely, to be so joyful
always in the memory of that day in his grandmother's
garden, and for the last two years he never dared to think
how sad his mother would be if she knew of his secret
joy — for ever since that gloomy day a year ago last April
when a telegram had made her cry and cry, Peter's
mother always had tears in her eyes when she spoke of the
good, white grandmother who was not sitting at her win-
dow with the heliotrope any more. Only this spring had
Peter's mother put off her sad black dress, and Peter had
felt guilty for thinking of red poppies and joy when he
ought to have been keeping his mind on black and sorrow.

Mrs. Grey turned into the yard with Virginia and a lit-
tle girl called Elsie Robins, who was Virginia's best
friend. Peter picked off a single apple blossom and let
it drop on the rim of Virginia's big straw hat

"A blossom fell right on my hat !" cried the little girL
Then she looked up and saw Peter in the tree.

"You naughty boy !" she cried, clapping her hands and
laughing. "That was you !"

Mrs. Grey looked up and laughed.

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"I suppose you saw us coming a mile off," she said.
**Little watchman-in-the-tree !"

"Come on up !" Peter cried down to the little girls.

"The ideal" cried Elsie Robins, looking down at her
stiif whiteness. "With our new shoes !"

"Some other time," said Virginia. "But we've got our
second-best dresses on, and we're ladies today, making
calls."

"How silly !" thought Peter, as he climbed down from
his seat and jumped into the grass.

"Peter will show you his flowers," said Mrs. Grey to
the little girls, "while I go in and talk to his mother."

Peter wished that the beautiful lady would stay, so that
he could look at her longer and wonder at her clear gray
eyes, and besides, he did not know what to do with these
two children, who stood there so stiflF and prim in their
second-best dresses.

"There isn't much to show now !" he said, when Vir-
ginia's mother had left them. "The hyacinths are gone
and the peonies are only just beginning to grow ; they look
funny, don't they, so brown and ugly. You'd never think
they'd turn out big and red, would you?"

"Oh, I don't know," answered Virginia, "I don't like
peonies, anyway ; they don't smell ; I only like roses."

"I like daisies best," said Elsie Robins.

"Oh, daisies !" scoffed Virginia. "They grow wild all
over the fields. What do you like best?" she asked, turn-
ing to Peter.

Peter knew very well what flower he liked best in all the
world, but he did not want to tell Virginia. He remem-
bered — Oh, so clearly, as if it had happened only a week
ago — ^how he saw the fairy-child with the sunny, golden

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curls in the sea of red poppies, and he knew that the
fairy-child was Virginia. But she did not seem like
a fairy-child now any more; her hair was no longer
golden, but light brown, and although he liked her a little
better than the others, she seemed just like any little girL

"What is your favorite flower?" Virginia repeated.

"I can't tell you," said Peter.

"Why not?" she asked, astonished.

"Because," he replied, "it's a secret."

"Will you ever tell me?" asked Virginia.

"I don't know," Peter answered. "Perhaps sometime."

"Oh, " cried Elsie Robins, "look at the lilies of the val-
ley over there !"

Peter had forgotten the lilies of the valley by the
fence in the comer of the yard, and the two little girls
stooped down to breathe in their frail scent

"You can pick all you want," said Peter, glad that he
had something to offer his guests. "Mother says that
makes them grow."

Then all three rushed upon the little lilies of the valley
and picked them as fast as they could.

"I'm picking mine for your mother," said Peter to
Virginia. "Don't you think she'll be glad?"

"You'd better pick them for another lady," said Vir-
ginia, "because mamma will see mine when I put them
in a vase on the dining-room table."

"But I don't want to pick any for Harold's mother/'
Peter protested, "nor for Mrs. Goddard, nor for Mrd.
Grimshaw !"

At that very moment the house door opened and Mrs.
Grimshaw's gloomy face popped out, whereupon Vir-
ginia and Elsie be^an to giggle. But Mrs. Grimshaw

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did not even notice the children in the comer of the
yard, for her eyes looked straight ahead and she hurried
on as if she could not wait to be back in her own big,
lonely mansion.

"What's coming there?*' exclaimed Virginia, nudging
Elsie, and pointing to a gay figure that was coming down
the street toward the house. "Look at the hat !"

"Oh, that's Miss Fanny Runkle," said Elsie. "Don't
make fun of her, Virginia. She's awfully nice."

"Oh, I know Miss Runkle," said Peter. "She comes
here often. She's always full of taflFy — ^just wait !"

Miss Runkle drew near in a lavender dress with a
loosely waving coat of light yellow silk over it, a hat
with plumes of purple and orange, much gayer than Mrs.
Montague's, and a fluttering veil.

"Picking lilies of the valley?" she said, very sweetly,
in a piping voice. "Isn't it just the right sort of day for
the first of June?"

"Yes, it is," said Virginia and Elsie like a chorus.

"You look like two little fairies," said Miss Runkle,
joining them on the grass. "A dark fairy and a light
fairy — ^little Black-eyed Susan and little Forget-me-not."

"I'm Black-eyed Susan !" cried Virginia, dancing about

"And I'm Forget-me-not," chirped Elsie, clapping her
hands.

"And what is Peter?" asked Virginia, pointing at him.

"Oh," said Miss Runkle, thinking a moment, while
Peter stood by grinning, "he's your little Peter Pan."

"What is Peter Pan?" asked Virginia.

"Oh, I know who Peter Pan is," cried Peter, for his
mother had read him the story of the fairy boy. "But I'd
rather be the pirate with the hook for a hand."

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THE BIRTHDAY WISH

Miss Runkle looked shocked.

"Oh, you wouldn't be the pirate," she said. "A nice
little boy like you !'"

Just then Mrs. Goddard came out of the house and with
her Harold's mother. Both bowed rather stiffly to Miss
Runkle, who was all smiles and pleasantness, and then
Mrs. Montague smiled at the children in a cold, tired way,
so that Peter did not want to bother her with messages
to Harold.

"I must go in," said Miss Runkle, in a flutter, "your
dear mother will think me a very late caller."

Then Miss Runkle hurried into the house, and after a
while Peter said to Virginia:

"There's only your mother and Miss Runkle in
there; I don't see why we can't go in and have some
cake."

"Let's !" cried Virginia. "And I tell you what you can
do," she added, pointing to the lilies of the valley in his
hand. "You can give your bunch to Miss Runkle."

"Oh, I don't know," said Peter, undecided, for he
really wanted to give them to the beautiful lady of the
garden.

"Mother, here we are!" cried Peter.

"Come in, children," his mother called.

Hardly had Peter set his foot on the threshold of the
parlor when Miss Runkle came rushing up to him, and
putting her hands on his shoulders and hovering over
him like a big, funny bird, she cried :

"Why, my dear little boy, your mother told me you
wanted a paint-box for your birthday."

"I do," said Peter. "That's true, all right." Peter was
puzzled.

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"You must know, Peter," his mother explained, "that
Miss Runkle is a painter."

Miss Fanny Runkle a painter — ^ real painter like Mr.
Woodfin ! That was too hard to believe.

"A real painter?" he asked, doubtfully.

"Of course, a real painter," said his mother. "There
is only one other in the town, and that's Mr. Wood-
fin."

So it was true : Miss Runkle and Mr. Woodfin !

'Why didn't you tell me before?" Peter gasped.

"Bless his heart !" cried Miss Runkle. "Your mother
promised she would take you to see me sometime dur-
ing your vacation, and then I'll show you all my
pictures."

Peter was so excited that he did not even take any of
the cakes and candies that Virginia and Elsie were nib-
bling.

"Are they big pictures?" he asked. "Are they the sea
—or the woods — or houses? Are they — ^are they flow-
ers "

"When I'm older," interrupted Elsie, "I'm going to
have lessons of Miss Runkle — I am."

"Oh, do you give lessons?" cried Peter. "I'd just love
to learn. Can't I have lessons?" he asked, turning to his
mother.

"We'll see," she answered, suddenly turning quite red.
"You're not doing well enough in your arithmetic to
deserve any extra lessons."

"Horrid, horrid 'rithmetic!" cried Virginia, and she
danced about the room holding a pink peppermint in one
hand. "When I'm older, I'm going to learn singing,
la, la, la!"

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THE BIRTHDAY WISH

"I'm going to learn painting/* said Peter, "but I don't
want to wait till I'm old."

"I like that spirit," said Miss Runkle^ and with much
laughing and many sweet words she said good-by to all
and fluttered out of the house.

"G>me, Virginia, father is waiting," said the beautiful
lady.

"Oh, not yet," pleaded Virgina, "it's so nice here."

But the lady of the garden led the two children away,
and when he and his mother were alone, Peter perched
on the arm of her chair and begged :

"Let me take painting lessons this summer, please —
please — ^please!"

"I'll have to ask father, of course, Peter," said his
mother a little sadly, "and I don't think he will like it."

"Ask him tonight!" said Peter impatiently. "As soon
as he comes home!"

For Peter's father had spent the day in Boston to
work in the library.

"There, his train is whistling now," Peter's mother
said, jumping out of her armchair. "Let's walk down
the street and meet him."

On the way she said to Peter eagerly: "Don't bother
him tonight ; he'll come home tired. I'll talk to him about
it myself."

Peter hung his head, for he hated to wait so long for
the decision.

"But tell him," he urged her, "I'd rather learn painting
than all the 'rithmetic and geography and history in the
world, and that I want it terribly much."

"I'll tell him," said his mother, with a queer smile.

And so it happened that Peter did not tell his dearest

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wish to his father, but whispered to his mother every
morning and every night of the next week:

"What did he say?"

And every time she answered with a mysterious smile :

"He hasn't made up his mind yet. Don't bother
him."

Ever since Peter had found out that Miss Runkle was
a painter and taught how to paint, he had consoled him-
self for the flight of Mr. Woodfin. Of course, Miss Run-
kle could not be compared with the wild man of the
woods, the great wizard, but as long as he was gone she
was better than no painter at all, and she did not seem
funny to Peter any more.

The last day of school came with good-bys none too
sad for Miss Bangs and her nose, and a noisy welcome to
the long summer vacation. And the first day of vacation
would be Peter's birthday. Peter went to bed early,
wondering if the brand-new paint-box would be waiting
for him in the morning. But if he had the paint-box and
wouldn't be allowed to take lessons, what good would it
do him then? Oh, of course, he could teach himself; be-
sides, he was sure that he could paint lovely pictures al-
ready, and didn't need anyone to show him how. With
this consolation he fell into a deep sleep, and woke up to
the singing of birds in the apple tree. A whiflF of sea air,
mixed with all kinds of lovely fragrance from grass and
flowers blew in at the window, as if it meant to say:
"Wake up ! Greetmgs on your birthday !"

So Peter got up quickly. But when he came into the
dining-room his fatiier and mother were already there,
waiting for him; and in front of his plate was a round.

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THE BIRTHDAY WISH

white-frosted birthday cake with one, two, three — ^yes,
ten candles. Ten years — Oh, how old he was today 1

"You are a big boy, now," said his father.

"No, Peter will never be a big boy to me," said his
mother.

And they said still more, but he could not listen, for
there beside the cake he saw a big book with a blue and
gold cover : "Robinson Crusoe." Peter took it up silently
and began to look at the pictures, but somehow he could
not say an)rthing : of course, it was a beautiful book, with
many pictures, and he had wanted this particular "Robin-
son Crusoe" like the one Harold had, but — • Lightly his
mother pulled him by the sleeve, and when he looked up
she pointed to the little table by the window. Oh, joy —
joy I There it was, all shining and new, the desired
paint-box, with all the colors of the rainbow and more
besides, and brushes thick and fine ! Peter gave one shout
and capered about in a wild war-dance.

"I am surprised to see how much he really cares for it,"
he heard his father say in a low voice, while Peter was
still romping. "Where could he have got this taste?"

"Come, Peter, and blow out your candles!" said his
mother. "You want to light them again this afternoon
at your party."

So Peter blew out the candles, as many as possible
with one breath, and the smell of wax mixed with the
scent of flowers from outdoors. Now when he sat down
to breakfast, he saw a little card on his plate — what could
that be? It was just a lady's calling card, like the kind
his mother had, with "Miss Fanny Runkle" on it, and
underneath was written in his mother's writing: "Your
painting teacher."

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RED POPPIES

Peter had to get up again and dance and skip round
the table. Happy, happy birthday !

"This is the best birthday I ever had in my life," he de-
clared.

"You've only had ten," said his father. "But you're a
tenth of a century old."

A tenth of a century — ^how grand that sounded ! But
what did Peter care if he was a tenth or a whole century
old, as long as he had his paint-box and was going to
learn how to paint!

After breakfast Peter ran out of doors, because it
seemed as if he must tell the apple tree and the birds
and the whole world that this was his birthday. He
stepped out on the porch and looked down the street.
There was a little girl coming toward the house, with
long, light brown hair waving in the breeze, and she car-
ried a bouquet in her hand. As she came nearer, he saw
that it was Virginia with a bunch of pink and white
roses. She laughed as she skipped into the yard and said,
lifting up the roses :

"They're from Aunt Qarissa's garden. Knd now,
Peter, you must stand still on the steps there and listen
to my piece. Mamma made it for me, but you're sup-
posed to make believe I made it. Now, stand still !"

Peter obeyed, and Virginia tiptoed up to the first step
on the piazza stairs and curtsied in a mischievous way,
then recited in a merry, sing-song voice :

' You don't mind if little girls
With curls and upturned noses

[ Come and wish you happiness
And bring you garden roses ?

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THE BIRTHDAY WISH

* You wonder how I heard

That yoiir birthday comes this week ?
From a little bird

With a yellow beak.

' Now take these roses here,

I think that none are sweeter,
And happy birthday cheer
Virginia wishes Peter."

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CHAPTER IV

CHRISTMAS COMES BUT ONCE A YEAR

THE summer had been very happy for Peter, and
the vacation months had passed like one long sum-
mer day of sea and woods and flowers and sunshine.
Every morning, except Saturdays and Sundays, he had
set out with his paint-box and Miss Runkle and Miss
Runkle's paint-box to sketch for two hours some scene
out of doors, a stretch of beach with bright greenish
sea behind, a group of trees at the edge of the woods,
or only a cluster of flowers in a garden. At first, Miss
Runkle had made him draw his sketches only, although
he always carried his precious paint-box along, but after
a while she let him use his colors, and, as the summer
advanced, allowed him more and more to do what he
liked. The sea had felt cooler and more thrilling to
swim in after he had painted it with all its cool, be-
witching colors ; the woods had seemed merrier to romp
in when he knew just how the sunbeams slanted through
the leaves, and each summer day Peter had played with
greater joy, because his mind had been full of bright
colors.

But when the autumn mists and rains had kept him
and Miss Runkle from tramping out-doors to catch, with
their brushes, the red and gold of the leaves, they

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CHRISTMAS COMES BUT ONCE A YEAR

had camped on different sheltering piazzas, sometimes
on Peter's own, sometimes on Virginia's, sometimes on
the Taylors,' and even once on Mira Mare. But now
November frost had bitten the earth, and Miss Runkle
shivered at the thought of sketching even on a piazza,
though Peter would have perched with glee on one of
the rocks to paint the great waves that towered into
the air and crashed against the cliffs, shooting up foun-
tains of snow-white spray.

But instead of that Peter, like a good boy, was sit-
ting on a stiff chair in the Runkles' living-room, pa-
tiently drawing a spray of dahlias in a tall green vase.
He was taking his lesson in the afternoon because
school had begun again weeks ago, and ever since its
beginning Peter's father had changed the daily paint-
ing lessons into weekly ones, for "school is more im-
portant," was his opinion. Although it was only half-
past three o'clock, darkness was already beginning to
settle on the alley outside, and Mrs. Runkle drew down
the shades and lit the lamps.

"It's turning real chilly; I guess I'll stir up the em-
bers," said the little wrinkled old lady in her cheerful,
homelike voice, and pattered over to the open fire that
had died down.

Miss Runkle was drawing the dahlias too from a
different angle, and nodding encouragement to Peter
at the other end of the room. The big, long-haired,
gray cat lay purring at Peter's feet, and the tea-kettle
was purring too, waiting for old Dr. Runkle to come
home, when they would all stop their work and sit
round the table with tea — ^hot lemonade for Peter — and
the fragrant cake that Mrs. Rtmkle baked herself.

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After all, if you couldn't have grand pleasures, such
as watching surf in a storm, you might as well have an
altogether cosy, cheerful time in a low homelike room
with old, old pictures and dim lamps and a fire crackling
away as if it had an old yam to tell. Now the old
doctor was coming home too, from his "constitutional,"
as he called the walk that he always took in the after-
noon, and he rubbed his thin, wrinkled hands and smiled
at the fire with his kind little grayish face. Dr. Runkle
was really no doctor any more, as Peter knew, because
he was too old and tired for a doctor's hard work ; but
he was writing a learned book for doctors, and for that,
as he had said, he needed to keep up his health and
spirits. Dr. and Mrs. Runkle were both so old and
wrinkled, like little mushrooms in the woods, but Peter
loved them both as if they were his grandfather and
grandmother.

"I guess it's time to stop," said Miss Runkle, and
Peter gladly packed away his drawing tools, for he had
found the dahlia in the green vase very dull.

Now Peter settled in a low armchair opposite the
doctor and watched Miss Fanny Runkle make the tea,
pouring water from the kettle over a silver ball on a
chain into an old copper teapot. Miss Runkle looked
like a bright-speckled toadstool between her wrinkled
mushroom parents, in a queer orange-colored dress
with green buttons for ornaments and an artificial orchid
pinned on at her waist. Locks of her thick flaxen hair
hung over her ears and her long jet earrings dangled
like little black bells as she bent over the kettle. No-
body knew how old Miss Runkle was, though Harold
had said once that she was much older than his mother.

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People always seemed to smile when she drew near
on the street or in some strange house, but here in her
home, by the dim light of the lamps, her queer orange
dress and her fantastic hair — ^that was what Harold's
mother had called it — ^and the many smiles on her pleas-
ant, homely face, all seemed quite natural and lovely.
Then the doctor talked about old times and Mrs. Run-
kle would nod and say, "That's right," and the cat
purred and the fire crackled and Peter was quite happy
in a peaceful indoor way, until it grew dark outside and
Mrs. Runkle sent him home, because it was late for
little boys.

On his way home Peter passed the house where Elsie
Robins, Virginia's playmate, lived, and he saw her
standing by the fence in her yard with a ball in her
hand. •

"Hello, Peter!" she called to him. "Where are you
coming from?"

"I'm coming from my lesson with Miss Runkle," he
answered.

"Oh, say!" Elsie cried, excited. "You know I'm ^
going to take lessons with Miss Runkle, too. Isn't that
fine? P'raps we can have ours together."

"Oh, no," said Peter. "I'll be far ahead of you—
you'll have to begin at the beginning."

"Oh, will I?" asked Elsie. "I thought I knew how to
paint a little. Well, I guess I'll make Virginia take
lessons, too. It's as good as piano, isn't it?"

"Oh, sure," said Peter. "But girls mostly take piano."

As Peter walked on, his spirits were darkened, as if a
cloud had settled over them ; yet cheerful little Elsie was
no cloud! Slowly he began to understand what was

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making him sad and what Elsie had to do with it: he
did not want to have the same teacher as little girls of
seven ! Why did boys never take lessons with Miss Run-
kle — ^why did boys think that painting was silly? He
did not want to ask his mother about this, because she
would not know, and as for his father — Peter suspected
that he, too, in his heart thought painting rather silly.
There was nothing to do, then, but to wonder why
things were so, and to let them be.

That night of Peter's walk home from Miss Runkle's,
big feathery flakes of snow fell lazily, and when Peter
went to bed the piazza roof beneath his window was
white. The first snow! All the November dreariness
was blown away by those gay white flakes, and there
would be snowballing in the morning.

Snowballing there was for many mornings during the
weeks that followed: snowballs flew on the way to school
and in recess time and on the way home, and in the
afternoons there were great battles in the woods. Dick
and Ted Raffles and Timothy Simpkins and Red
Mike and all the other boys of the neighborhood —
even Harold, whose mother was keeping Mira Mare
open till after Christmas this year — ^would come to-
gether in a clear place in the woods and then take sides,
one led by Red Mike and the other by Harold. Peter
was always on Harold's side for the sake of old friend-
ship, though he knew that Mike^s was the fiercer, as
Red Mike was known for throwing three round, hard
snowballs in the same time that others threw one,
and he never seemed to get hit himself. There was
much shouting and pushing and tumbling into the
snow on those jolly battle-days, and Peter would come

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CHRISTMAS COMES BUT ONCE A YEAR

home to the blazing fire with tingling cheeks and icy
feet.

Those were happy winter days, and if school and
Miss Bangs and the home lessons had not interrupted
the playing, they would have seemed like one long
peal of merry laughter. But on Saturdays there was
no check to fun, and Peter felt as if the wide world
were his playground. It was on a bright, crisp Saturday
afternoon that Peter set out with his sled for the woods
to see who might be coasting down the steep hill —
for the snow was hard and he was sure to find friends
there on a Saturday afternoon. He was alone, for Dick
had to make a snowman in the yard with his little
brothers while his mother and the nurse were away,
and Peter preferred older company. The hard, frozen
snow glistened in the strong sunlight, and the twigs of
bushes and trees, ice-frosted as they were, gleamed as
if they were studded with jewels. Peter passed by the
little gray cottage where Mr. Woodfin lived, and won-
dered what the wild man of the woods might be doing
inside by the great fireplace of which Peter had some-
times caught a glimpse when the cottage door had stood
open. He had not seen Mr. Woodfin since that June
day, so long ago, when the wizard had told of the long
cruises that would take him away all summer ; and when
the summer had gone by, Peter had watched for the
solitary painter and had often prowled round his little
rough cottage, but had not met him once. Perhaps he
buried himself in the winter, like a fox, and would wake
from his winter's sleep in spring ! Wrapped in thoughts
like these, Peter turned into the wood, which was truly
a sparkling fairyland today. Icicles hung from the

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branches like intricate lacework from fairy hands, and
pools of ice gleamed like mirrors in the snow. Skip-
ping, stamping and sliding on, Peter came to the spot
where in summer a little brook would babble over stones
which seemed at this time a glistening waterfall of ice.

Oh ! Just when Peter had been wondering about him,
just when he had hoped and yet least expected to meet
him — ^there stood Mr. Woodfin, the wizard of the woods,
painting the icy brook ! He stood with his back toward
Peter and wore a great, wide overcoat; yet Peter knew
him instantly — ^in the first place, because there was no
other man who could paint in the town, and secondly,
because he had a glimpse of the gray hair under the
slouch hat, and he recognized the massive shoulders
and the brisk stroke of the painter's arm. Peter tip-
toed up to Mr. Woodfin, but not near enough to be
heard, and watched him silently. There on the picture
was the frozen brook, a tangle of gleaming icicles, be-
hind it, the trees with the glistening icy branches
and the light blue sky peering through them. To-
day Mr. Woodfin was not painting with snakes of col-
ors on a wooden plate — ^which Miss Runkle called oil
colors on a palette — ^but with water colors, just as Miss
Runkle painted and Peter himself; and the picture was
small, besides. And yet how wonderful it was, how
like the real brook and trees and sky, and yet even more
beautiful — in a way! For a long time Peter did not
dare to open his mouth.

"That blue in there is just the way it looks to me !"
escaped his lips at last.

Mr. Woodfin turned round briskly, and when he saw
Peter, laughed in his gruff way.

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CHRISTMAS COMES BUT ONCE A YEAR

"Haven't seen you for a long time, old chap!" he
said, turning back to his work.

"I've been hoping to see you," said Peter. "Where
were you all the time?"

"Been on cruises all summer, 'most up to October,"
Mr. Woodfin answered "Had to go to Boston, oflf and
on, the last two months. Guess you were at school
when I was round here."

"I'm taking painting lessons now, you know," said
Peter, with a tremor of pride in his voice.

"You are?" said the painter, squinting at the trees.

"Yes," Peter explained. "I've had them all through
the summer, 'most every day and since school began,
once a week. Miss Runkle is my teacher.**

"Don't know her work," said Mr. Woodfin, and he
seemed so absorbed in his painting now that Peter did
not dare to say an)rthing more. So he stood in silence,
watching every stroke of the painter's brush with
feverish attention.

Peter had stood this way for some time, when he
heard something stir behind him. He turned round
and saw a strange gentleman in a heavy fur coat, who
was watching Mr. Woodfin too.

"Ah, my little friend!" said the stranger, in a low,
melodious voice. "Don't you remember me. Master
Loring?"

Peter stared at him : those black, gleaming eyes, that
handsome face with the dark moustache — ^where had he
seen them before?

"Oh, I know you !" he cried out suddenly. "You are
the gentleman with the swan."

The stranger laughed.

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"Now see, your memory is better than mine," he said,
gaUy. "I had forgotten about the swan. You asked
me what I liked best in all the world, because I had
the impertinence to ask you '*

Now Peter remembered clearly how this bright gen-
tleman had spoken to him, even two years ago, as
politely as if Peter were grown up.

"It wasn't impertinent at all," Peter returned. "Be-
cause I was so glad to tell you "

"A poppy, I believe, was your love," his companion
went on.

"Not one poppy," said Peter, eagerly. "But many,
many poppies — sl great big sea of red poppies."

The word poppy had not been on Peter's lips for a
long, long while, not even when he had spoken to the
beautiful lady of the garden, but he knew now that the
red glow of the poppies had been in his heart all the
time.

What a wonderful man was this that made him tell
about the red poppies, almost as wonderful as Mr.
Woodfin himself! The painter meanwhile had not
even turned round during Peter's conversation with the
newcomer, but was working away with speed. Peter
knew that grown-up people introduced strangers to each
other, but he would never be able to go through such
a complicated piece of politeness, nor did he dare to
disturb Mr. Woodfin — ^and besides, although he now
remembered the stranger distinctly, he had forgotten
his name.

"I was going to call on your father and mother," said
the polite gentleman. "Do you want to walk with me,
or have you something better to do?'*

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"Oh, m show you the way!" said Peter eagerly.

Now he remembered that he had set out to play with
the boys, but he could play with them afterwards just
as well.

"Good-by, Mr. WoodfinI" cried Peter.

"Good-by!" the painter said gruffly, hardly turning
round.

As Peter walked home with the prince-like stranger,
he felt very grown-up, very proud, and hoped that
everybody on the street would be staring at them hard.

"Why did you stay away so long?" Peter asked his
companion.

"I was abroad the last two summers," he replied.
"And in the winter I rarely skip off on visits. I am an
instructor in Harvard — I teach, you know, and that
keeps me rooted there. But I have vacation now and
my friend, Mrs. Montague, asked me to come down for
the week-end — so here I am."

How exciting it was for Peter that the stranger was
a guest of Mrs. Montague's and that he would be able
to ask Harold all about him.

After a short silence the stranger said:

"That was a very good sketch. Do you know the
painter?"

"Yes, 1 do," said Peter, feeling important "He's
Mr. Woodfin. He's a wonderful man. He goes on
long cruises with the fishermen in the summer, and in
winter he lives all alone in a little cottage — it is near
here, I can show it to you — ^and paints all the time and
never sees anyone at all."

"A hermit I" said the stranger.

"Yes, a hermit — ^that's what mother called him," re-

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marked Peter, and as he felt in a gay and talkative
mood, he said what he had just told Mr. Woodfin:
''I'm taking painting lessons now, you know."

"Indeed !" said the stranger, raising his eyebrows, as
if he took a special interest in Peter's painting. "You
must show me your sketches."

Peter was puzzled.

"You're a friend of father's, aren't you?" he asked
shyly.

"I should be extremely honored if your father would
call me his friend," was the polite answer.

"And you like books, too, don't you — learned books?"
Peter asked, still with hesitation.

"I devote my life to writing books — ^books that at
least pretend to be learned," said the stranger, in a
light, gay voice.

"Well, now—" Peter felt the blood rush to his cheeks;
as he stammered: "You don't seem at all like some-
body like father — ^you don't seem at all — bookish, you
know."

The stranger laughed merrily.

"Not bookish !" he repeated. "Why, that's all I am.
If I weren't bothered with teaching, I should bury my-
self in a library and never come to light."

"But — ^but you wanted to see my pictures," said Peter
awkwardly. "And father doesn't care about pictures.
I guess he thinks they're silly."

Peter was frightened: perhaps he ought not to have
said that about his father!

His companion smiled mysteriously.

"Perhaps your father seeks beauty in other ways,"
he said.

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After a few moments silence, Peter began conversa-
tion along another line.

"When you were a boy/* he asked, "what kind of
games did you play?"

"I am sorry to say I played no games at all," said
the stranger. "My childhood was very lonely."

"Oh!" exclaimed Peter, full of pity.

"You see, my mother was a Spanish lady who sat
by her window embroidering all day long, and my
father was a scholar and pored over his books day and
night, and as we lived in the country and had no neigh-
bors for a mile, I was my own companion always."

"And you never, never played with other boys?" cried
Peter, struck with horror at the thought.

The stranger shook his head and smiled.

"But didn't you go to school?" asked Peter eagerly.

"No," said his companion. "Till I went to college
at fifteen, I studied with my father and a tutor who
lived with us."

"What was he like?" Peter asked, anxious to know
everything about this strange man's life.

"He was a queer fellow," was the answer, "who played
the flute in his leisure hours."

"The flute?" said Peter. "What is that like?" He
had only heard the organ and the piano played, and
once, at Mrs. Montague's, a violin.

"It has a very high, melancholy voice," said thc^
stranger. "It used to give me gloomy dreams."

"But didn't you have any fun?" asked Peter, still
anxious for the boyhood of his new friend.

"Oh yes, I had my fun," he answered, "roaming
about the country by myself. Especially in winter, when

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the roads were quite lonely, I used to wander for hours
alone. You see, I was just as. much of a hermit as your
painter there."

Two hermits, and how different they were — one so
gruff jand wild, and the other so polite and gay ! Peter
could not decide which was the most wonderful of
the two.

Meanwhile they had reached the house, and Peter's
mother stood on the porch with her hat and coat on.

"Why, Mr. Atherton!" she cried, turning red in her
face with surprise. "What an unexpected pleasure!"

Atherton was the name, of course; how could
Peter have forgotten it?

"I was watching Mr. Woodfin paint," Peter explained,
eagerly, "and I turned round and saw Mr. Atherton
watching too. Wasn^t that funny?"

Peter's mother led the visitor into the parlor, and Peter
followed, rather sorry that he could not have the new-
comer for himself any longer.

"Mr. Loring has gone to see a parishioner," she said,
"but he must come back any minute."

"Mother," said Peter, with excitement, "Mr. Atherton
wanted to see my sketches. Perhaps I'd better get them
now, before father comes home. Father'U have so much
to say to Mr. Atherton," he added, remembering how he
had told the stranger what his father thought about pic-
tures, and fearing that Mr. Atherton might guess that
he would rather not show his sketches in his father's
presence.

"Why, Peter, I don't know if such a little boy's at-
tempts at painting can be very interesting to Mr. Ather-
ton," said Peter's mother, reproachfully.

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"Oh, but I want to see them/* said the caller, with his
engaging smile. "Master Peter and I have become friends
on the road, and I am very eager to see what he can do !"

Peter rushed upstairs and flew down again with his
big portfolio in his arms. Trembling with suspense, he
drew out his best sketches and set them up on a chair by
the window, so that the light fell on them as it should.
There was the rock with a blue-green wave breaking
behind it ; the beach at low tide, with rosy and golden re*
flections on the sand ; the group of pine trees in front of
the deep, blue sea, and the autumn leavea in Miss Run-
kle's yard. Mr. Atherton looked at each silently with a
nod and a slight smile, and Peter's heart thumped for fear
that he would not like them. After the last, Mr. Atherton
turned to Peter's mother and said in his musical voice:

"See that your son doesn't bury his talent."

Peter made a bound of joy. 'He did not quite under-
stand what the stranger meant by these queer words to his
mother, but he knew what "talent" meant, and he could
tell that Mr. Atherton liked the pictures.

"Oh, mother," he said, in his excitement, led on by Mr.
Atherton's approval and the pleased look on his mother's
face, "I wish Mr. Woodfin was my teacher."

"Why, Peter!" returned his mother, startled. "You
were so happy with Miss Runkle."

"Oh, Miss Runkle is all right," said Peter, "but Elsie
Robins is going to have her, too, and Elsie is only a little
girl of seven. It would be so fine to have a big man for
teacher, and Mr .Woodfin's pictures are so grand '*

Peter heard his father's footsteps outside.

"Father, here's Mr. Atherton!" he cried, running to
meet him. "I found him in the woods."

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"Mr. Atherton— well, well!" said Peter's father, with
surprise and pleasure on his face.

While his father shook hands heartily with Mr. Ather-
ton and welcomed him after his long absence, Peter
quickly gathered up his sketches and rushed upstairs with
them, lest his father should see them and think it very im-
pertinent of him to "show oflf" before such a distin-
guished caller. And then he went back into the woods
to play with the boys in the snow.

Christmas was in the air. Holly and mistletoe and red
ribbons made the shop windows bright, and in the mar-
kets were heaps of garlands and branches. Every grown-
up acquaintance whom Peter met on the street looked as if
he had some lovely secret, and every child looked merrier
than at any other time of the year. It was strange that
outside of the town, over the fields and the woods, where
there were no signs of "Christmas sale" and "holiday
gifts" there hovered the same mystery, as if the trees
knew that Christmas was near.

When school closed, a week before Christmas, Miss
Runkle said that Peter might come to her house every
morning to paint a design that he had been thinking out
as a Christmas gift for his father and mother. Peter
would skip off, telling his mother that he was going to
Dick's to play, and enter Miss Runkle's house with a
thrilling secrecy, as if he were doing something forbid-
den. Then he would paint his design of a Christmas tree
with tall candlesticks, like columns, on either side, and
an open book beneath it, with the words "Merry Chri^st-
mas." Meanwhile Mrs. Runkle would string popcorn
and gild pine-cones by the fire, and Miss Runkle would

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paint beautiful Christmas cards with gold backgrounds
and angels and lighted windows and bayberry candles.
There was nothing like a lesson about these mornings,
especially when Miss Runkle told stories and hummed
old tunes; they seemed to Peter more like painting-
parties.

It was after the third of these mornings that Peter's
mother called to him when he came home:

"Oh, Peter ; you'll be sorry when you hear what youVe
missed !"

"What?" asked Peter. "Was Dick here?"

"I thought you had just come from Dick's house," said
his mother.

"I mean Harold, of course," said Peter, blushing, and
his heart beat fast as he trembled for the safety of his
secret.

But his mother guessed nothing, and replied :

"Mr. Woodfin has been here."

"Mr. Woodfin!" cried Peter, all disappointment and
anger, and he was just going to say : "There I was with
Miss Runkle, and I might have been with Mr. Woodfin !"
when he checked himself and said : "But why did he come
in the morning — ^nobody else ever comes to see you in the
morning."

"I was standing on the piazza throwing crumbs to the
sparrows," said Peter's mother, "when I saw him pass by,
and then I asked him if he wouldn't come up, and he
came."

"Oh, dear," moaned Peter, "why wasn't I here? What
did you talk about?"

"He told me about his son Jack," said his mother, "and
about his pictures and his cruises in the summer "

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"And did you tell him to come again after Christmas,"
Peter interrupted, "to look at the tree?"

"I told him to come and look at the tree, and I think he
may do it," said Peter's mother, with a mysterious smile.
"And besides, I showed him some of your sketches."

"You did !" cried Peter, fairly jumping at his mother
in his joyful excitement. "What did he say?"

But she smiled again in the same mysterious way, and
made Peter quite impatient.

"You had better wait till he comes again," she said,
"and ask him yourself."

"Oh, tell me now !" Peter clamored. "Which ones did
you show him ?"

"The same that you showed Mr. Atherton," his mother
replied, still with the annoying smile.

"Which did he like best?" Peter asked, for. he must
find out something in his impatience.

"The one with the autumn leaves," said his mother.

"The last one I did !" exclaimed Peter. "I guess that
is the best."

Peter wondered, during the days that followed, if his
mother put on the mysterious smile whenever he asked
her about Mr. Woodfin just because there was mystery
everywhere in this last week before Christmas. Two
rooms in the house — ^the guest-room and his mother's
little sewing-room — Peter was not allowed to peep in.

"Don't you know that Santa Claus is our guest in
there?" his mother would say when he stood, burning
with curiosity, with his hand on the doorknob of the
spare-room. Then Peter would remember that he had a
secret too, and skip off laughing to himself.

As the days flew by, the mystery in the air grew like

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CHRISTMAS COMES BUT ONCE A YEAR

a thickening mist. Peter's mother, who never touched
the piano the whole year round, rumaged after old music
books and played carols for herself and Peter to sing in
the evenings. Then, when the candles were lit on the
piano and made a golden glow, it seemed as if Christmas
were stealing into the room through the cracks in the
window. Even Peter's father, who was busiest at this
season, so that Peter kept saying, "Poor father has to
work hardest on holidays,'* nevertheless took one even-
ing off to read aloud "The Christmas Carol," as he had
done every year since Peter was six years old. Then
Peter put a mighty log on the fire and threw in some
driftwood to make the flames blue and green, and when
there was a great, jolly blaze they all drew their chairs
round the fire, Peter's mother took up her embroidery,
and Peter's father began in a deep voice:

"Marly was dead, to begin with."

How Peter listened eagerly, as if he had never heard
the adventures of Scrooge before, and yet every word of
the story seemed like an old friend. During the pauses of
the reading, low, rich sounds from the organ in the
church, where the choir was practicing the anthems for
Christmas morning, floated into the room, muffled, so
that one could not tell the melody, but beautiful as if the
air outside were all music.

The next day Peter's mother took him to a vesper
service in the church, which was quite transformed into a
Christmas grove of fir trees. Bright red poinsettias made
Peter's heart leap with joy, and when he saw his father
in the pulpit among green branches with a mild glow from
the shaded lights falling on his face, it seemed to Peter
that he was not seeing his father at all, but one of the wise

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men that came from the Orient. And Peter's father read
the story of the Nativity. When the sound of the last
word had died away, the organ set in with a greats singing
peal, like the sea rising at high tide, and above it a man's
voice clear and strong :

"Comfort ye, comfort ye my people '*

While the aria rang out, and after it the hjmins and
carols that he knew so well— "The First Noel," "O Little
Town of Bethlehem," "Silent Night, Holy Night," and
"Hark, the Herald Angels Sing" — Peter fixed his eye on
the red poinsettias and it seemed to him that they were
singing carols too with their bright joyful redness.

When they stepped out again into the hushed street, the
full moon was glowing in the black sky behind the pointed
gray church spire; the pine tree loomed up beside the
church like a jet-black shadow, but the snow on its
branches and on the ground below glistened silently in
the magic light.

"Silent night, holy night" — ^hummed Peter's mother.

Peter was living in a spell and could not say a word
till they had reached the house door.

"Only two more nights !" he cried, jubilantly, "and then
I'm going to have my party."

For Peter was going to have a children's party. Uncle
Joe and Aunt Eliza were coming from Boston to spend
Christmas Day, but Christmas Eve was to belong al-
together to Peter's friends, with no grown-up people by,
except Dick's father and mother, and Mr. Grey with the
lady of the garden. Peter had /hoped that his strange
grown-up friend, Mr. Atherton, might come too with
Harold, as he was visiting Harold's mother, but Mrs,
Montague was giving a house-party on Christmas Eve,

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and she could not spare her guest, though she would
gladly send Harold to Peter's party — poor Harold, who
would otherwise be lonely with all the grown-up people
at Mira Mare.

When Christmas Eve had come at last, Peter was so
excited that he could not talk clearly, and when he fol-
lowed his mother down to the library, he was silent.
Throughout the whole house there was an unnatural
hush.

Peter opened the door ; a great shout greeted him and
a peal of laughter — for there all the children were assem-
bled, a half-hour before he had thought that they were
coming ! In a twinkling they were swarming round him
and cr3ring : "Merry Christmas, Merry Christmas, Peter !"
There was Dick and his little brothers, and Harold, and
Ted and Bill Raffles, and Timothy Simpkins and his sis-
ter, and Joe Noodles, and even Red Mike; in a comer
behind a chair stood Elsie Robins, and piped :

"Virginia is coming, too ; but she's late !"

Peter was too happy to do an)rthing but laugh, as he
skipped from one of his guests to the other.

"Where's father?" he asked suddenly, for in his first
excitement he had not noticed that his father, who of
all people belonged here most, was not in the room.

"I guess he's busy with Santa Claus," said Mrs. Taylor,
who was smiling mysteriously at Peter's mother.

Hardly had she spoken, when Peter's father appeared
in the doorway and asked eagerly :

"Has Virginia come yet?"

No one answered, for all at once a high silvery voice
started to sing outside of the library window. The voice
was very small, but lovely, like the ringing of a little bell.

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Peter's mother opened the window gently, and all lis-
tened breathlessly to the song:

"God rest ye, meny gentlemen, let nothing you dismay.
Remember Christ our Saviour was bom on Christmas Day/'

When the last happy note had faded and all the chil-
dren still were sitting spellbound, Peter rushed to the
door to call in the little waif who must be cold, singing
and strolling, as he had heard these wandering minstrels
did, from house to house.

"Why, it's Virginia!" he cried, on the porch, from
which he saw by moonlight Virginia, all wrapped in furs,
standing beneath the window, and her father and mother
behind her. "Oh, come in, Virginia; I thought it was a
little boy singing."

Virginia skipped into the house, threw off her furs,
warmed her cold hands by the fire, laughed merrily and
seemed a little wood sprite. Her father and mother
came in, too : Mr. Grey, whom Peter saw rarely, very tall
and stately, and the lady of the garden more beautiful
than ever, dressed in pale gray, with a twig of holly on
her gown.

"Now, all come in !" called Peter's father genially, and
there was a rush for the parlor opposite. The door was
still closed and the eager children stopped short and
waited, speechless.

The door was opened : the tree. Oh, the tree ! At first
it was just one great cobweb of silver threads glistening
under the golden candle flames; then Peter saw little
icicles twinkle at the tips of the branches, chains of silver
and green and gold, and gilded pine-cones and silver stars

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CHRISTMAS COMES BUT ONCE A YEAR

and — Oh, at the top, a bright red ball, like a red flower
springing from the Christmas tree.

Peter clapped his hands and laughed with joy.

"You like your tree!" said Virginia's mother, who was
standing behind Peter.

"I love it!" said Peter. "And do you know what I
like best on it?"

"The candles, I should think," said the beautiful lady,
"or, perhaps, the icicles?"

"No," said Peter, looking up at her eagerly. "It's the
red ball up there at the top — isn't it bright and red ? It's
as good as the red poppies."

Peter forgot in his excitement that he was shouting
out his dearest secret, but the others were all making a
great noise, now that the first hush of awe was over, and
no one had heard him but the beautiful lady of the gar-
den, who smiled at him and said :

"Surely ; it's your red winter poppy !"

His red winter poppy — ^yes, that it was, and Peter felt
very happy.

"Perhaps Virginia will sing us another song,*' sug-
gested Peter's father.

"Oh, yes ; do, do !" cried all the children.

Then Mrs. Grey sat down at the piano and accompanied
Virginia as she sang in her high silvery voice the joyful
song: "I Saw Three Ships Come Sailing By," with its
refrain, in which all joined, "On Christmas Day in the
Morning."

iWhen she had sung the last stanza, Virginia turned
round sharply to Peter and said :

"Now you sing!"

"I can't!" said Peter. "Who can?"

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But there came no answer. Meanwhile, Peter's father
and mother had been opening his gift for them, and show-
ing it to the Taylors — for Peter saw it all with a comer
of his eye, while he was really looking at Virginia — and
Mrs. Taylor now held up his picture and said to the chil-
dren:

"This is what Peter can do." . . .

"Oh my, did you do that?"

"Gee, isn't it pretty!"

"The Christmas tree and candles !"

So cried the children, and Peter's mother whispered in
his ear:

"It's lovely, Peter! I'm proud of it."

5\nd even Peter's father slapped him on the shoulder
and said: "That's very nice work, my boy!" And he
looked pleased with his present, even though it was a
picture.

But Mrs. Grey took up his design and looked at it a
long time with a mysterious smile, then turned to Peter
and asked in her musical voice, like the sea wind :

"Did you think that out all by yourself?"

Peter nodded, and although she said nothing further,
Peter was sure that the beautiful lady of the garden liked
the picture more than all the rest

"You know, Peter," said Elsie, "I'm going to have les-
sons from Miss Runkle now."

"And I too," said Virginia, eagerly. . "And Jean
Mason and Nellie Bridgman, and lots of girls. Miss
Runkle's going to teach drawing at our school — rafter
Christmas vacation she's going to start — and everybody
wants to take it, and she says she doesn't see how she'll
have time for Peter Loring."

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*'Oh, dear !" cried Peter. "I hope she won't drop me !"

Secretly he was thinking though how disagreeable it
would be to share a painting teacher with so many little
girls. But as he did not want to think of anything that
wasn't joyful on Christmas Eve, he looked up at the red
ball on the Christmas tree and its gleaming light chased
away every shadow.

"Oh, I forgot !" suddenly exclaimed Harold, and dashed
into the hall.

"What did you forget?'* cried Peter, rushing after him.

"Your present from Mr. Atherton," said Harold, pull-
ing out a package from under his coat.

"From Mr. Atherton!" exclaimed Peter.

He tore off the wrapping and found in his hands a
beautiful picture of a swan gliding on a dark stream,
with his long, slender neck curved down to the water.

"Oh, that's his swan !" said Peter, with delight

"His swan — what do you mean?" asked Harold.

"Oh, that's a secret between Mr. Atherton and me," re-
plied Peter, and ran back to the merry company to show
the gift that made him proud.

But when he stepped into the parlor, he found a hush
of suspense and the children sitting in a ring on the floor
with all eyes and many mouths wide open.

"Come, boys!" called Peter's mother, and beckoned
to him and Harold to sit down, too.

'A strange, rattling noise was sounding from the fire-
place, so that Peter and all the others started to look in
that direction, although there was no fire at all in this
room, and a screen stood in front of the andirons. Then
came a stamping of heavy boots. Wonder of wonders —
who could be stamping behind the screen in the fireplace?

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"Oh!"— One scream of fright and delight from the
children, for there stood Santa Qaus himself I Peter
forgot that he did not believe in Santa Qaus, because he
saw him now with his own eyes. His beard was long,
shaggy and white; his cheeks and nose were red and
jolly, as if he had just been riding in the cold wind; his
eyebrows bushy and gray; he wore a suit of bright red
wool and a fur cap pulled down low over his forehead,
and on his back he carried a bulky bag.

"My reindeer were waiting on the roof, and they're im-
patient,** said Santa Qaus in a deep, gruff voice. "But
before I go on my round to all your chimneys to swoop
down and fill your stockings, children, I am going to drop
a little token for each one of you now, so that you won't
forget it was Santa Claus who filled your stockings.'*

"Oh !" gasped the children in a breath.

"How did he know we were here, mother?** whispered
Virginia.

Then Santa Qaus stepped into the middle of the ring
that the children had formed on the floor, and stooping
low, emptied his bag on the rug. Out flew little tagged
packages, and the children scrambled after them, ttun-
bling over one another.

"Oh, what a dear little baby doll !" cried Virginia.

"Gee, ain't dat a fine knife?" exclaimed Red Mike.

"Oh, Dick, look at my balloon!" cried Dick's little
brother Tommy.

Peter found a picture puzzle for himself, but he had
hardly looked at it when another boy pulled him over to
look at his present, and then another, and another

"Santa Qaus is going, children," said Peter's father.

"Oh, no ; stay, stay !" cried the children.

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"I can't stay/* said Santa Claus, shaking his shaggy
head, "my reindeer will fly away."

His voice was not as deep now as it had been at first,
but it was still gruflf, like a voice that Peter had heard
before.

Peter looked into the eyes of Santa Oaus, and all at
once it seemed as if he had looked at these gray-green
eyes, with the bushy gray brows, before.

Now Peter remembered suddenly that he did not be-
lieve in Santa Claus, and all was strange and puzzling.

"Good-by, Santa Qaus!" cried the children, waving
their presents. "Good-by!"

Santa Claus stepped behind the screen; there was a
stamping again at the fireplace and he was gone. Peter's
father was gone, too. Somehow, Peter could not enter
immediately into the fun and noise-making about him,
because something was working in the depth of his mind
— ^he could not tell what. He found himself wondering
why his mother had quickly shut the -parlor door.

After a while Peter heard the house door open and
close, and then his father came back into the room and
sat down by Mrs. Grey. Peter slipped out of the room
quietly, when all were talking and laughing — ^why, he
could tell but vaguely. As he saw Harold's warm over-
coat lying in the hall, he slipped it on and ran out of
doors. There was a figure as big and broad as Santa
Claus in a great fur coat tramping down the street. Peter
ran after it as fast as he could against the cold night
wind.

"Santa Claus I Santa Claus !" he cried, panting.

At last Santa Qaus turned round ; his beard was gone
and the moonlight fell on the face of Mr. Woodfin.

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"I knew it was you !" cried Peter, quivering with ex-
citement. "I knew it was you — but I didn't dare to
think!"

Santa Claus — ^no, Mr. Woodfin — ^broke into a hoarse,
merry laugh.

"So you knew^ did you?" he said. "Well, you're a
bright boy."

"I didn't know at first," said Peter, remembering now ;
"but afterward, when your voice was different But it
doesn't matter," he added with ardor, "it's all the same —
it's just as exciting to have you here at Christmas as
Santa Claus."

The painter laughed again.

"Well, now that we've met this way," he said, "I might
as well tell you myself. Your mother was going to put
my letter into your stocking tonight."

"Your letter?" asked Peter, mystified.

"The letter," explained Mr. Woodfin, "that I wrote her
saying I'll be glad to give you painting lessons."

Peter was speechless. He was to have lessons of Mr.
Woodfin, the wild man of the woods — ^his dearest wish
had come true !

"Your mother showed me your sketches, that day I
came in and you were out," said Mr. Woodfin, "and she
told me you were rather wishing you might change teach-
ers. Then I thought it over if I'd take a pupil again —
and now when spring comes, well go sketching together."

"Oh, I'm so glad, I'm so glad!" cried Peter over and
over again, till his great Santa Claus simply said, "Good-
by" and walked away.

When Peter came back to the house, the children were
all sitting round the dining-room table at supper.

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CHRISTMAS COMES BUT ONCE A YEAR

"Why, Peter, where have you been?" cried his mother.
"You're a nice host!"

"I went to look for Santa Claus," answered Peter.

"Oh, did you see him?" clamored all the children.

"That's my secret," said Peter, and he whispered into
his mother's ear:

"I saw him — I talked to him — Santa Gaus — ^Mr. Wood*
fin — ^he told me — I'm so glad !"

"Don't tell the other children!" warned his mother
with her finger on her lips.

"Tell us — did you see the reindeer?" asked Virginia.

"I mustn't teU," said Peter, and he had a hard time
dodging questions.

Peter was almost too excited to eat, although there was
an abundance of ice-cream and cake and candies and rais-
ins and nuts and all good things. Although he was laugh-
ing and shouting with the other children, he was really all
the time standing with Santa Claus on the street by moon-
light and hearing the happy news.

When the children had all departed with much flut-
ter and laughing, and the grown-up people too, and his
father and mother sat contentedly on the sofa, Peter
dropped on a footstool and stared at the gleaming red ball
on the Christmas tree and said: "I'm so glad, I'm so
glad!"

Then he told his father and mother about his pursuit of
Santa Claus, his father looked shocked, but laughed
heartily nevertheless, and his mother said :

"Now you know your best present already. But you
will want to find your, stocking full just the same to-
morrow; so you had better go to bed — Christmas has
really only just begun."

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"Oh, I hope it will never stop being Christmas!'* said
Peter, and rubbing his eyes and casting a last glance at
the red ball on the Christmas tree, he stumbled reluctantly
upstairs. It was so quiet in his room, after all the merry
noise of the evening, and the moonlight on the snow
looked peaceful, as if the world outside were still wait-
ing for Christmas to descend. Peter opened his window :
the least rustling in the air seemed like the beat of an
angel's wings.

As Peter crept into bed he saw his stockings, like long
black shadows, hanging by the fireplace. So there were
still joys for the morning, when he was already so happy
that one more drop of joy would overflow his heart ! The
happiness of the Eve passed in gay visions before his
•closed eyes, and then all hardened into one bright red
ball at the top of the Christmas tree, and dissolved again
into a train of sparkling visions.

And Peter said over and over again, to lull himself to
sleep:

" Christmas comes but once a year,
And when it comes, it brings good cheer.''

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CHAPTER V

IN AUNT CLARISSA^S GARDEN

EIGHT years of work and play had gone by and
Peter's school days were over. Peter had passed
his entrance examinations — ^he was eighteen years old last
month — and for three days had been a sub-Freshman. The
summer days were not long enough now to celebrate in, to
do nothing in from morning till night with a zest unparal-
leled. Dick had passed, too, and there was great joy in
the town, and most abundantly in the house of the Rev-
erend Mr. Loring, who seemed to walk in a radiant golden
cloud. Only on the proud seat of Mira Mare there was
secret gnashing of teeth, for Harold had "flunked," and
over his vista of vacation hung, like a black cloud, the
prospect of being tutored all summer.

"I was captain of the track team at school, you know,"
he had boasted to Peter, only three days ago. "I've got
some pretty good chances."

And he had strung up a list of the clubs he would
"make" like a chain of pearls, when the fateful letter
from the college arrived and cut the precious chain
brutally in two.

Pity for Harold, however, did not keep Dick and Peter
from dancing war dances on the sand by the red light of
a great bonfire on the night after the good news had

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come, nor from planning the most and the greatest de-
lights that they could crowd into the long summer days
that followed. So they would go in swimming in the mid-
dle of the forenoon and linger lazily on the sand, watch-
ing the tide creep in, and reflecting with a relish that it
was quite right, quite virtuous to lie in the sand and do
nothing; in the afternoons they would row or sail in
Dick's little dory, or play brisk sets of tennis ; the nights
were given up to frolics on the verandas of neighbors and
friends, or moonlight strolls on the long beach.

But after two weeks of undiluted pleasures, the joy in
idleness began to wane because it was no longer dear, and
Peter waited with growing impatience for the return from
one of his sketching cruises of his good teacher, Mr.
Woodfin. Through all the long, dreary school year Peter
had touched his paints only once in a while — ^and then as if
he were holding a forbidden tryst — for he had poured all
his strength and spirits into the study that he disliked,
knowing, as he did, that there was only one key to his
earthly paradise, and that was to prove that he could go to
college, even though he did not want to go. At last Mr.
Woodfin had come back, and once more Peter was stand-
ing on the beach in front of his easel beside his beloved
rough teacher. The sea, at high tide, was a lucid green —
a beguiling green, that seemed to hold many other fleeting
colors in its depth, and Peter's heart beat with a joy long
lost and all the more precious regained, as his brush flew
in pursuit of the enticing color.

"I'm not going to look at another printed page," he
said to Mr. Woodfin. "I'm sick and tired of black and
white; it's only colors that I'm going to lay eyes on this
stunmer !"

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IN AUNT CLARISSA'S GARDEN

"You don't seem to be keen on study/' laughed his
teacher.

"No, I'm not," answered Peter, "and never was and
never shall be. You know what I'm keen on, and you're
the only one in this blessed town who understands — ex-
cept Miss Runkle," he added, with a bitter smile.

Miss Runkle, good soul, was always in a flutter about
her many little pupils at the girls' private school, and Peter
knew now, without accusing himself of conceit, that the
paintings by his first teacher were poorer than his own.

"I'm not going to think about the end of the siunmer,
at all," Peter began again. "I'm just going to paint away
and forget everything else, as if this summer would last
forever."

Mr. Woodfin very often made no answer at all, and
Peter was always sure that the silent hermit never would
repeat what he had heard, so that to confide to him was
like confiding to a rock that listened, immovable, to the
telltale sea.

To Dick, Peter could not speak of the rebellion in his
heart, and when his comrade would begin with :

"When we'll be room-mates," or "By the time we're
Sophomores" — Peter felt like a traitor all the while.

"Oh, let's not plan so far ahead," he would say. "Let's
make the most of the summer while it lasts."

"But it's fun to plan," Dick would respond. "How
queer you are about it !"

Sometimes his secret wish weighed heavily on Peter's
spirits, and he was aware with misgivings that one day
not far distant he would have to reveal it to his father and
decide his fate. But Peter's father was so proud of the
son who had passed all his examinations, and so radiant,

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when he planned out courses of study for him, that Peter
had not the heart to fling a bomb into his castle in the air.
Perhaps it had been wrong of Peter, after all, never to
give voice to his true passion during the last school year,
although he had declared it often enough in years gone
by; perhaps what had seemed to him prudent foresight
had been but foolishness — for now that his father be-
lieved him on the right road to a studious career, the
shock would be too great if Peter should announce all at
once that he did not even want to enter college. As for
his mother, Peter suspected that she guessed where his
heart really lingered, but for a peculiar reason he could
not seek her advice. For his mother had a way of liking
the peonies in the yard because "Peter thinks they are so
pretty," and enjoying a twilight hour on the porch because
"father finds it so restful ;" but she never liked a peony
because it was red and jolly in her eyes, or an evening
revery because it was soothing to her own spirits, and
alas! — when father's and Peter's delights conflicted, she
was like an anxious bird fluttering from one to the other.
In these days Peter's mother was absorbed in planning
a welcome for Mrs. Grey and Virginia, who were soon
coming back to stay at home for good, after their six
years' absence in warm climates in winter and watering-
places in summer on account of Mrs. Grey's health,
which now was practically restored. To the beautiful
lady of the garden, the idol of his childhood, Peter's
imagination clung once more with a vague hope that she
might in some miraculous way help to shape his destiny.

There was yet another figure in Peter's world whom
he kept in reserve to call upon at a time when he should
need another's magic power of persuasion — and that was

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IN AUNT CLARISSA'S GARDEN

Maurice Atherton, Peter had never forgotten how Mr.
Atherton had taken his side, four years ago, when he had
first told his father that he did not want to go to college,
and he believed that he could still rely on the strange
philosopher's fine understanding.

It was on a hot, languid afternoon, when the towns-
people had all closed their blinds and only a few were
slouching over the baked sidewalks, that Peter strolled
to Mira Mare on the windswept prcwnontory, in pursuit
of a cool breeze. On the most exposed side of
the broad veranda, he found Harold sprawling in a
Gloucester hammock, with a pile of schoolbooks scat-
tered about.

"Jeffs is coming in a minute," he groaned, "on this
beastly day."

Jeffs was Harold's tutor, and the torture of his gay
young life.

'Well, I'll go down on the rock and sleep," said Peter.
"I didn't come to see you; really, I came to catch a
breeze."

"Ma's taking a nap ; so is Aunt Hetty, and Pa's away, as
usual," Harold went on, in his flippant tone, "but you'll
find Atherton on the other side. Go and talk to him."

So Mr. Atherton was visiting here again! No com-
panion could be more welcome to Peter, who walked to the
other side of the drowsy house and found Mr. Atherton
reading in a low armchair and cutting the leaves of a
small volume.

"Ah, Peter, welcome !" he cried, and extended his hand,
languidly. "Come and distract me. I'm bored."

"With that book?" asked Peter, glancing at the slen-
der volume in Mr. Atherton's hands.

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"Yes," said the philosopher. "My poems have just
come out, and I find that I don't like them."

"Oh, I didn't know that you were a poet," Peter ex-
claimed, in new admiration.

"No more than you are, my friend," Mr. Atherton re-
plied, lightly, "only I have drifted into the black-and-
white form."

"Is painting a kind of poetry?" asked Peter, to whom
no one had ever spoken in this strain.

"Oh, isn't it all one?" his companion returned, "whether
you sing in colors or paint in words, or speak in music?
If we were Archangels we might imbibe the rainbow-
tinted music of the spheres with one all-inclusive sense."

Peter looked out over the light blue sea in a revery:
this was all new to him and foreign, as if a merman
had risen dripping out of the water and had spoken to
him in the language of starfish and oysters.

"Won't you read me your poems?" he broke the long
silence.

Mr. Atherton consented, but told Peter to follow him
down to the beach, lest his reading might wake up some
of the napping inmates of the house.

The water had a delicate forget-me-not shade, and the
tide was very low, so that an abundance of seaweed, glis-
tening bits of shells, little silvery fish and glassy jellyfish
lay on the shining wet sand. An exquisite coolness
seemed to spread from the sea and sand, though there
was scarcely a breeze, and even the low, monotonous mur-
mur of the tide was cooling. As they walked up and
down, Mr. Atherton read aloud from his poems, and
strangely it happened — or, perhaps, he chose them on
purpose — ^that they were mostly odes and sonnets to the

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IN AUNT CLARISSA^S GARDEN

sea. Peter forgot the hostility toward the whole world
of letters that he had acquired during the last years of
school; he forgot that he was walking with a learned
man, a friend of his father's; he forgot everything else
while he seemed to hear the sea itself speak in melodious,
rhythmic lines. There was nothing even that reminded
him of a book, for he might as well be looking at a gor-
geous train of colors — a, sunrise with changing clouds of
purple, gold and pale rose reflecting in the sea !

"More! more!" cried Peter, when his companion had
closed the little book and slipped it into his pocket.

Mr. Atherton shook his head with his old gay smile,
and replied :

"Enough, no more!
'Tis not so sweet now as it was before!"

A white figure had become visible on the veranda of
Mira Mare, and Mr. Atherton had to join his hostess.
So Peter said good-by and as he walked back slowly,
like one who has been all day on a rolling ship and has
not accustomed his feet to land, it seemed to Peter that
the half-hour with Maurice Atherton had been unreal,
a kind of mirage in his soul, beautiful, beguiling, but
severed from the rest of life.

Peter could not go home now, back into the sober house
where the light had been shut out with the heat on this
languid day ; he could not hear his mother remark on the
rise of the temperature, or see his father pore with his
dim eyes over heavy books in the darkened study, as if
one diligent hour more or less spent on his sermon were
of any consequence at all. No, Peter, like a mariner who

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feels cramped and uneasy on land, had to set sail again
on the sea of high adventure.

So when he had crossed the causeway, Peter turned in
the opposite direction from his homeward course. Heat
rose almost visibly from the pavement, and the houses,
with shutters closed, all seemed to be taking a nap. When
he came to the large, old house that belonged to Mr.
Grey's sister, called Miss Clarissa by all the town, a
whiff of heavy, sweet garden scents made him turn round
the street comer to look at the garden whence the frag-
rance rose.

Oh, lovely adventure! In the midst of quaint, old*
fashioned blossoms, gathering gilly-flowers, stood Vir-
ginia! Peter had not seen her for six years, and yet he
knew it was Virginia, though she seemed a very different,
older sister of the child he had known before. She could
not be more than fifteen, but he would have taken her for
seventeen or eighteen, had he not known ; her hair, once
light brown, was dark and wavy like her mother's, and
she was slender and her profile no less exquisite than that
of the beautiful lady of the garden. How strange that his
imagination should have flown to Virginia's mother all
these years, never dreaming that there was another lady
of the garden no less beautiful, and young like Peter
himself.

Virginia looked up from the gilly-flowers and saw him.
Her eyes were startling — ^not gray and calm, like her
mother's, but dark and brilliant, at once melancholy and

gay.

"Why, Peter!" cried Virginia. "You must be Peter—
I can tell that by the way you used to have of staring into
the air, as if ypu were in a trance."

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IN AUNT CLARISSA'S GARDEN

Peter opened the garden gate and greeted her with out-
stretched hand : "I'm mighty glad to see you back, Vir-
ginia. I didn't know you were here "

"We've come sooner than we planned at first," she re-
plied, with laughter in her eyes. 'We're with Aunt
Qarissa — ^I've been away so long! Why, it's just a
bit uncanny, you know, to come home like Rip Van
Winkle."

"Aren't you glad to be home again?" asked Peter, who
had never lived outside of Gullport, and could not think
of life elsewhere as quite genuine.

"Come into the bower, where it's shady," Virginia in-
vited him. "And we can talk."

She had a slight French accent that sounded musical
and distinguished to Peter's ear. He followed her into a
green bower of fragrant honeysuckle, and from his seat
there he saw the many-colored garden as in a frame of
horseshoe form.

"Isn't it lovely here?" said Virginia, burying her face in
her gilly-flowers. "I've often been homesick for Aunt
Clarissa's garden."

"It must seem good to get home again, after living in
foreign countries so long," remarked Peter.

Virginia smiled wistfully.

"Yes, it does," she said, in a meek, unconvinced tone.
Then she looked straight into Peter's eyes and asked him
suddenly: "Do you still paint?"

"You bet I paint!" Peter exclaimed. "It's tiie only
thing I care about in the world! And I have a fine
teacher — Mr. Woodfin. He knows how to paint. Nobody
else in Gullport knows anything about it."

Peter bit his lip; even though Virginia was an old

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childhood friend, he knew nothing about her now, and he
had confided too much for the first fifteen minutes of
conversation. But Virginia looked at him with a curious
gleam in her shadowy eyes.

"Then perhaps youTl understand/' she said, with a low
sigh.

'Understand what?*' asked Peter, all afire with curios-

ity.

"Of course I'm glad to be back here," Virginia began.
"It's my home, of course. And it's a joy to think that
father can stay with us all the year round now — and I
love Aunt Clarissa — ^and I was very, very glad to see
Elsie again, and I'm looking forward to May and Kath-
erine and Lucy — I've been writing letters to them all
the time I've been away. Elsie came to the station with
i^unt Qarissa this morning. Aunt didn't let your mother
know after we arrived, because mother is too tired to see
anyone till tonight ; she isn't quite strong yet, you know,
and the heat makes her tired."

"I'm sorry," said Peter, whose ardor for the beautiful
lady of the garden had strangely taken flight and settled
elsewhere. "But why — ^what did you mean when you said
I might perhaps understand?"

"Yes, I was beginning," said Virginia, with some hesi-
tation. "I was telling you how glad I was to see Elsie
again. Well, I was very, very glad, but ^"

"But what?" asked Peter, eagerly.

"Why, somehow she seemed diflferent — ** Virginia hesi-
tated again.

"Different from what?" Peter encouraged her.

"Oh, different from my friends at school in Geneva,"
she said, quickly. "I suspected it, too, from Elsie's let-

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IN AUNT CLARISSA^S GARDEN

ters and from the others' letters, and from Aunt Qar-
issa's letters "

"What were your friends in Geneva like?" asked Pe-
ter, shyly.

"Well, you see," Virginia explained, "it was a great,
big school, and there were pupils from England and from
France and from Germany — and Americans, too, of
course. Now, there were a lot of stupid people and a lot
of silly ones, but my friends — ^perhaps, you'll thing I'm
boasting, but I can't help it — ^my friends were the bright-
est of all, the — ^the most exciting."

"I'm sure they were !" exclaimed Peter.

"We had a kind of circle — 3. club, you would call it,
perhaps," Virginia went on, "and we called it the Ring of
the Muses, because we were nine, and we each had a
talent."

"Oh, you sing!" exclaimed Peter, who suddenly remem-
bered one Christmas Eve, many years ago, when Virginia
had been a little waif outside his window.

"Oh yes, I've always sung," she replied. "And my
best friend there, Yvonne, sang contralto, so that we could
have duets, and another friend accompanied us. You can
imagine what happy evenings we used to have! And
there was one who wrote thrilling ballads and read them
to us late at night, when the matron thought we were
asleep — ^and one could paint — though you wouldn't have
liked her pictures, probably — and one read aloud beauti-
fully and moved us all to tears, and then . . . Well, I
guess you don't care what my Muses can do, but I just
wanted you to understand "

"It must have been a wonderful company," remarked
Peter.

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"Oh, no, it wasn't wonderful," said Virginia, "only —
perhaps you see now why Elsie seems so different She
doesn't seem to care about anything at all. I asked her if
she kept up her painting, because I knew she used to like
it with Miss Runkle, and she said, *Oh, no; I haven't got
the time for that' And I asked her how she was spend-
ing her days in summer, and she said, 'Having a good
time.' Her letters were always awfully nice and pleasant,
you know, and so were Lucy's and Katherine's and
May's, but there was never anything in them that — ^that
was like Yvonne and my other Muses."

"You're right," said Peter, clearly aware, all at once,
of what he had felt but vaguely till now. "Not one in
GuUport, except Mr. Woodfin, really knows what's good.
They're awfully nice and jolly, you know, but they don't
care — ^whether a sunset is red or brown."

"So you say the same," returned Virginia, surprised.
"And you have never been away !"

"I've never wanted to go away," Peter replied. "I like
this old place too well. I've had the jolliest life — ^I never
could have had the sanie good times in a big city, you
know. Here there's the sea and the woods and all these
gardens "

"And yet " Virgfinia suggested, slyly.

"No, it isn't that I ever wanted to go away," Peter de-
clared. "I like them all awfully well — but, instead of
leaving them, I'd rather make them see my way.**

"Bravo!" cried Virginia, clapping her hands gaily.
"Perhaps you'll be^a seer some day — ^ kind of prophet"

Peter's cheeks were glowing with excitement; it was
new to be believed in, and an inspiration.

"My father used to tell me the story of the young

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IN AUNT CLARISSA'S GARDEN

Samuel," Peter began, thinking aloud, and then won-
dered suddenly why he had turned his discourse into
this path. "And — ^he — ^he thought, because I was his
only son "

"He wanted you to be a prophet !" guessed Virginia.

"Yes," said Peter, "but a diflferent kind from the one
you mean."

"Aren't we having a grown-up conversation ?" Virginia
cried out suddenly, with a gay laugh. "But I like it."

"I was walking with Mr. Atherton before I came here,"
Peter told her. "He read me his poems on the sea."

"Oh, I remember him," replied Virginia, "with black,
brilliant eyes and a very distinguished manner."

"Yes, that's Maurice Atherton," returned Peter. "He's
very learned, but gay, too ; and he isn't studious the way
father is; for instance **

"Oh, he was not like the others here," said Virginia.

"That's true," said Peter. "His eyes were made for
seeing. But he doesn't belong to GuUport — ^he only comes
once in a while."

"That's too bad !" exclaimed Virginia. "He might be
a palm tree in the desert."

"Well, I'm glad I found you," Peter declared, a little
roughly, because he was not used to making compli-
ments. "You and I are both stranded on the same desert
island, Virginia — ^that is a bond, isn't it?"

"Let's seal it !" said Virginia, and they shook hands sol-
emnly.

Then all at once Virginia broke out into gay peals of
laughter.

"Ungrateful ones we are!" she cried. **Look at our
desert island ! Isn't it a lovely one?"

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She pointed to the garden flowers as she spoke, and
now rose merrily, Peter was a little dazed by her quick
change to mirth from wistful contemplation.

"Come," she beckoned him, "I'll introduce you to Aunt
Qarissa's flowers, one by one, I know them all very well.
Aunt Clarissa always used to write about them, as if they
were her best friends, and the first thing I did this morn-
ing was to make their acquaintance, and now they seem
like old friends to me."

Virginia stepped carefully into the middle of the big,
round flower-bed, fringed with small white alyssium,
where all the old-fashioned flowers grew together, while
Peter stayed at the outskirts, and, gliding from one flower
to another, she gave Peter the name of each kind in turn.
There were the snap-dragons with their quaint pouches of
crimson and yellow, tall blue lupin and larkspur, and the
sturdy orange marigold. Feathery cockscombs, like little
dark, crimson trees, towered over the old rose mallows
and blue petunias. Bushy phlox — crimson, purplish, rose
and pure white — ^grew in profuse clusters, and sweet Will-
iam, with its delicate, zigzag edges, and its ring of dark
red on the white background of each little single blossom.
Great, hearty zinnias, yellow and crimson and golden,
stood like a stout bodyguard in front of the most fra-
grant company of all — ^the white and lavender and deep
crimson gilly-flowers and green mignonettes that mingled
their quaint, lovely scents.

"And this is love-in-a-mist," said Virginia, pointing to
a single light blue blossom in a network of frail, feathery
foliage. "These funny leaves are the mist, and the flower
is love, I suppose."

Then she whisked on to the daintiest part of the gar-

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den, where, with light blue bachelor's buttons sprinkled
among them, poppies were greeting Peter's eye — ^not the
red poppies of his heart, but frail, breath-like white and
pink poppies, and the California poppies with their low
stems, silvery leaves and big, yellow blossoms.

"And now, this kind/' she said, as if she had been lead-
ing up to a climax. "What do you suppose this is
called?"

She picked up a fragile, long-stemmed poppy that
seemed white silk, with a pink border painted by tfie most
delicate brush.

"This is my namesake," she said; "it's name is Vir-
ginia."

"Virginia — " Peter repeated, aimlessly.

Virginia, her name, the poppy in her hand, the garden
with its many-tinted flowers and mingled fragrance, all
seemed to Peter like a tale of long ago. There was a
drowsy silence.

"What's your favorite flower?" she asked, suddenly.

Peter started as if he were awaking from the blurred
vision of a dream to another vision alive and bright : pop-
pies, blood-red, glorious, were glowing all at once, and in
their midst bright sunshine was streaming from the golden
curls of a child.

"I'll tell you what my favorite flower is," he cried, in a
fever of excitement, "even though it's my great secret.
Poppies are my favorite flowers — ^not pale poppies, like
these; but red, fiery, glowing poppies, like those I saw
once "

"When did you see them?" asked Virginia, eagerly.

"When I was six years old," replied Peter, "but Tve
always seen them since. They never leave me, even

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though they seem to for a time — ^they are the vision that
leads me on — ^the vision I live for."

"A vision of red poppies?" questioned Virginia, puz-
zled, but ardently curious.

"Yes," said Peter, "a great sea of blood-red poppies
and a child with golden curls in the midst of them, and
strong, dazzling sunlight over all."

"A child with golden curls," repeated Virginia, as if she
were trying to grasp the vision, too.

"Yes ; you were the child !" said Peter.

"I !" cried Virginia, bewildered.

"Yes ; it was at my grandmother's long, long ago, and
you were there, too, with your mother," Peter explained.
"But what difference does it make where it was or when it
was or who it was? It is just my vision."

"Your vision of red poppies," said Virginia, pensively.

In the tense silence that followed, Peter felt as if he
had betrayed someone, as if he had given away a secret
too precious to lose.

"Peter,'* said Virginia, in a strange tone that seemed
like a whisper so secret, and yet like a trumpet-blast so
inspired — ^"when you are a great artist, you must paint
this vision for me — ^not till then, not till you can make it
just as you are seeing it now — ^with the poppies just the
same bright red — so that I can see your vision, too."

"I will do that!" cried Peter. "I'll hate myself if I
don't — I promise you I will — ^1*11 swear "

"No, don't swear," interrupted Virginia, "perhaps
you'll never be great enough, or, perhaps "

"Perhaps they won't let me be an artist," said Peter, de-
fiantly. "But they shall — ^they must. You shall see my
red poppies with jour own eyes, and they shall bloom as

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flowers never bloomed before in your sight, and you shall
never forget them as long as you live."

"Oh, Peter," cried Virginia, and in her eyes there was
an ardent light.

The swinging of a door made them start, and when
Peter turned round, he saw Miss Qarissa, the benign,
white-haired lady, come slowly down the steps. Whether
she had seen him or not Peter did not know nor care ; he
only knew that he wanted to escape commonplace chatting
after his adventure with Virginia.

"Good-by," he cried, and fled out of the garden.

It was all clear to him now : he must go to art school.
There must be no more doubt, no more playing with the
idea of going to college, no more cowardly fear of offend-
ing his father. He would go to him without delay — ^now.

Peter found his father in the library. Because the heat
was oppressive, he had closed his eyes and rested his
head against the back of the armchair, though he held an
open book on his knee. At Peter's brisk entrance he
started and opened his eyes.

"You here ?" he said, blinking drowsily.

"Yes, father," said Peter mercilessly. "I've come to
tell you something important."

Peter's father sat up erect and looked at his excited son
with inquiring eyes.

"Father, I'm awfully sorry — " Peter began, stupidly.

He knew that his will was firm, and his conscience was
clear, too— but his father's eyes were so dim and moist
from too much pity.

"What are you sorry about ?" the father asked. "What
have you done?"

"I haven't done anything," answered Peter, "and I'm

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really not sorry about an}rthmg — except that you'll be
disappointed. Oh, father, I wish you could understand —
I wish you would see my way '*

"What is it?" asked his father, mystified and patient.

"You must know," Peter cried out, "that I don't want
to go to college !"

"Not go to college !" gasped his father, and Peter had
never seen such wounded astonishment in any eyes be-
fore. "After you have passed all your examinations !"

"I only worked for those exams to please you," said
Peter. "I never cared about them all the time. And
you know what I really care about — you know what I've
always cared about, since I was nine years old ; you know
I want to study art !"

"I thought that was all happily over," said Peter's
father, hoarsely. "I supposed that a year of serious work
had cured you of that idea."

"Father, art isn't a disease to be cured of," cried Peter,
vibrating with excitement. "When I'm painting my mind
is in its true health "

"I don't mind your painting as a recreation," his father
interrupted mildly. "You know I have not hindered
your taking lessons with Mr. Woodfin."

All at once Peter realized that his painting lessons
from his tenth year on had been a considerable expense,
and that a long art education would be a burden to his
father, a sacrifice for an aim of which he did not approve.
The awkwardness of this state of affairs made Peter
silent.

"I know it takes long to study art," he began again,
lamely, "and it would be a great expense — ^but so it
would be to study law or medicine or divinity or any other

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line — " It seemed to Peter that he had said all this once
before, several years ago; that he had already lived
through this very moment at another time.

"If you spent your time on law or medicine or divin-
ity," said his father, "or any other serious line of study,
you would have a solid and serious profession at the
eno

"Why serious? Why solid?" cried Peter, in high ex-
citement. "I should be a failure in every one of them.
I should always want to break loose, and I should spend
my time on painting an)rway to the neglect of my profes-
sion, and my vocation, so called, would be my burden."

"I should have no objection," said Peter's father, with
a sigh of resignation, "if you wanted to take up architec-
ture."

That was a kind concession on his father's part, but
Peter shook his head sadly.

"It isn't lines and construction that I care about," he
tried to explain, "it's colors — only colors."

His father stared at Peter as if he had spoken in a for-
eign language.

"It doesn't seem right to me," said the father heavily,
"that a man should base his life work on his liking for
pretty colors."

"Pretty!" gasped Peter.

That word cut deep.

There was an abyss here between father and son,
between the best of friends, an abyss over which there
was no bridge, unless some rainbow, sprung from sun-
light and clouds, should span it by a miracle.

"Perhaps you'll think it over," Peter said hoarsely, and
went upstairs to his room.

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In the evening of the same day, when Peter met his
mother in the hall before dinner, she took his hand
furtively and said in her bird-like way:

"I'm so sorry, Peter; father told me. I know your
heart is with your painting. But Tm sorry for father,
too ; you know how he has set all his hope and ambition
on your

Peter could not help smiling. This was his mother
as he knew her, as he had expected her to view his
problem !

"It's too bad," he said, "but I can't give in now, just
because father doesn't see my way."

The one question that absorbed father and mother and
son was not mentioned again that night, nor for days
afterwards, though each knew that the other was medi-
tating on nothing else. During these days Peter avoided
conversation with Dick and Harold, because their plans
for college life became unbearable. Even Harold, who
had failed in his examinations, was surer of his future
than Peter, who had passed them all. Virginia he saw
now and then, though never again alone, and when they
met there was a secret understanding in their glances like
the greeting of old friends who meet among strangers in
a foreign land. Virginia's mother, the first beautiful lady
of the garden, was even paler than when Peter had seen
her last; her calm gray eyes were sadder, and her hair
was now silver-gray. She spent many hours with Peter's
mother on the piazza, and on shady parts of the beach,
and Peter was sure that his mother had confided to her
the problem of her son's career. Yet neither Mrs. Grey
nor Virginia herself ever spoke to him about his future,
and Peter did not want to see Virginia alone until he could

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announce that he was surely going along the path toward
the glorious goal which she had pointed out in that in*
spired hour among the flowers.

But one morning Peter was stopped on the street by
Virginia's stately father.

"I hear you don't want to go to college/' he said in a
jovial tone in which, however, Peter could hear a note
of reproach.

"Oh, did Virginia tell you?" asked Peter, astonished.

"No, Mrs. Grey told me," he answered. "She said you
wanted to be a painter. But let me give you a bit of ad-
vice, Peter : don't follow a romantic whim like that ! Art-
ists have hard times in this country, and many of them
come near starving — and they haven't much compensa-
tion for their hardships. No, Peter, get a good, all-round
college education first, and then, if you don't think that
you were cut out for a learned profession, go into some
solid business — ^you won't regret it. Of course, it isn't for
me to direct your future, but as an old family friend I nat-
urally take a live interest *'

"Thank you — ^you're very good," stammered Peter,
"I'll have to think about it."

Mr. Grey had to hurry on to his factory, and left Peter
standing still on the sidewalk, with a dull pain in his heart.
It made him sad to think that Virginia's father, like his
father, should be looking at his life with eyes so different
from Virginia's and his own.

To Mr. Woodfin only Peter could talk unchecked of
his troubles while they worked together like old col-
leagues.

"I told your father — the other day when I met him on
the street — ^that he ought to send you to art school right

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off," said the hermit of the woods. "But I can't help
you ; he wouldn't listen to an old painter like me."

"There isn't another man in GuUport who knows any-
thing about it," said Peter with a sigh.

"It isn't so hard on a father, either," Mr. Woodfin
went on. "Now, my son Jack has just won a prize in
Paris."

Rarely as Mr. Woodfin mentioned his son, he always
spoke of him with pride, for Jack Woodfin had begun to
have a good reputation abroad. Peter remembered the
painter's son, who had visited his father occasionally in
the summers some years ago, as a great jovial fellow,
rough like his father, but without a trace of the hermit.
It was so simple for Jack Woodfin to be a painter and at
the same time his father's pride; why could not Peter be
the same?

As his teacher's advice was fruitless with his father,
Peter returned to his last and strongest resource. He in-
quired of Harold in a casual way when his mother was
going to invite Mr. Atherton again, and then he lived
for days in anticipation of Mrs. Montague's .week-end
party. On the day of the philosopher's arrival, Peter
called at Mira Mare and asked for Mr. Atherton alone.
Then he simply stated his case, and asked Mr. Atherton
to persuade his father.

"For, if you can't convince him," said Peter, "then I'll
have no more hope."

"If it's as bad as that," his older friend replied, "I must
see what I can do. I shall call on him this afternoon ; in
the meantime, I shall think up all the arguments I can.
We must convince him at last."

"Oh, you are awfully good !" cried Peter eagerly.

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"Don't thank me yet," said Mr. Atherton, "I may fail."

"I don't believe you have ever failed," said Peter earn-
estly, "and I don't see why you should now."

Peter walked home — ^no, he ran and skipped, as in his
childhood days — ^with a heart rashly light, considering
that nothing had yet been accomplished. But there was
calm, mysterious force in every gesture, every glance of
Maurice Atherton's that his father would not be able to
resist

"What makes you so cheerful?" asked Peter's mother,
at home. "Are you going somewhere especially gay this
afternoon?"

"No," answered Peter, "I am going to stay in my room
and stretch canvases and clean my palette."

These occupations were but an excuse to watch undis-
turbed at his window for Mr. Atherton's approach, and
to measure the length of his visit. At last, at three
o'clock, Mr. Atherton came : the bell rang shrilly through
the house ; Lizzy opened the door — -

Peter's whole life's course hung on this call. He could
not hear iheir voices, but he could picture his father
gazing with dim, puzzled eyes at his eloquent caller ; he
could picture the light, ironic play about Maurice Ather-
ton's lips and the mysterious gleam in his eyes.

The clock struck four, and still they were talking
downstairs: it seemed that Peter's father was hard to
persuade, or perhaps Mr. Atherton had talked for a
long while on something else before he led up deftly to
the all-important topic.

The silence that enveloped Peter was uncanny when
so much was being said, unheard by him, that was sig-
nificant. Now there were voices in the hall — ^his mother's,

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too. Now Mr. Atherton came out of the house, walked
down the path to the gate — ^turned round again, raised
his hat and hurried out of sight It was over. But what
was the outcome?

A sudden reserve came over Peter. He did not want
to run down in an undignified way, and ask if Mr. Ather-
ton had turned the balance in his favor. Though it was
a question of life or — as it seemed to Peter in this mo-
ment — of death in life, he would not ask it now.

How the minutes of the old, slow clock were dragging!
How sluggish and oppressive the air was today! What
foreboding silence ! Did nobody want him—

Footsteps on the stairs — b, rustle of skirts

"Peter!"

That was his mother's voice. He opened the door and
his mother fluttered in eagerly, while tears were glisten-
ing in her eyes.

"Peter!'' she said in a quivering voice, and laid one
arm round his shoulders, "your father has consented.
I'm so happy for you, my boy."

"Hurrah!" cried Peter, and embraced his mother
stormily. He could have embraced the whole earth in
that moment and flung his arms round the moon.

He made a bound toward the door, but his mother held
him back.

"Wait till I've told you how it happened," she said, and
sat down by the window.

"Your father called me in," said Peter's mother, "and
there I found Mr. Atherton telling him that he ought
to let you study art. It wouldn't be right, he said, to
add one more mediocer lawyer or doctor to the many in
the country, when he might be giving it a good artist —

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that this country needed artists more than anything else.
Oh, he said many things — ^that artists were happier in their
profession than other people, that they belonged to a sort
of higher order of humanity. . . . He talked so beau-
tifully and in such a convincing way that your father,
moved at last, said you might enter the Boston Art SchooJ
this fall, and so— and ^"

Peter did not stop to hear the end of his mother's tale,
but bounded downstairs and straight into the library.
There his father sat by the window, absently brooding.

In that moment the full measure of his happiness
flooded Peter's heart, and all at once there flashed before
him the fiery sea of bright red poppies glowing in the sun-
shine that played on the gleaming golden locks of a child.

"Father!" exclaimed Peter, jubilantly, "perhaps some
day you will see my vision, too."

Peter's father turned round, startled.

"What vision?" he gasped, and looked at Peter as if he
were mad — ^looked at him steadily with dim eyes, moist
from pity.

But Peter cried in an ecstacy of joy :

"Red poppies!"

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CHAPTER VI

THE STUDY IN GREEN AND BLUE

SIX years later, Peter's mother introduced him one
day with a proud tremor in her voice:

"This is my son, just come back from Paris. He studied
in the Boston Art School five years, you know, and then
went to Paris."

And it was natural for her to be proud as she thus
presented him to the lady who was calling on her with
Mrs. Montague, for no other parent in the little town
of Gullport had a son coming home from Paris: other
sons came home from college, from law school or at most
from the West, and no one went abroad except on a
vacation.

"Oh, how do you do, Mr. Loring!" gfushed Mrs.
Odiome, the friend of Mrs. Montague. "I suppose you
have been leading a gay artist's life."

"Oh, no indeed," said Peter who had been asked the
same question three times on that same day. "I've been
doing hard work with little time left for gaiety. Some
day, when I'm not slaving any more, I want to go back
to Paris and be gay."

"Not too soon, we hope," said Peter's mother who
seemed to move in a radiance ever since he had come
home three days ago. "Five years in Boston at Art

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School and a year abroad is a long time away for an
only son."

"Ah, but your son comes home dutifully in vacation,"
said Mrs. Montague with a mock sigh. "But think of
Harold who barely pops his head in at his mother's door,
when he flits oflf again to a house-party or a cruise or a
camp in the wilds. His mother is not attraction
enough."

It occurred to Peter now that he had not seen Harold
more than three or four fleeting times in a summer dur-
ing the long vacations ; that, in fact, he had lost contact
with his old schoolmate. And so it had happened, too,
that he had scarcely set his foot on the threshold of
Mira Mare, and Mrs. Montague seemed like a glittering
stranger within his house. Was this indeed the woman
toward whom he had felt hostile throughout his child-
hood, from whom he had shrunk as from a green, insidi-
ous snake? How queer, he thought, were the judg-
ments of children ! There was something in the haughty
curve of Mrs. Montague's profile that reminded him
uncannily of the Russian sculptress whom he used to
meet with Chabrier, his colleague, at the little cafe near
Notre Dame. Oh, Cecile's eyes were wistful and gray
and Mrs. Montagfue's green and cold like the sea on a
calm summer day, and Mrs. Montague was the grande
dame whereas poor Cecile was a child of Boheme. . . .
But there lurked in Mrs. Montague's face as in C6cile's
something that made him wonder and gfuess at secrets
and hidden bitterness, as one might guess at dark sea-
weed stirring at the bottom of an opaque and shadowy
rock-pool. There was little to wonder at in most
of the faces in Gullport, little to driv? ;a paint-brush

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into his hand for a chase after the will-o'-the-wisp soul.

"Show me some of your studies, Mr. Loring," said
Mrs. Montague. "You know my one passion. My eye
is always on the alert for the youngest genius."

"How hard for the next to youngest!" said Peter,
happy in Mrs. Montague's attention. This green-eyed
enemy of his childhood, who had noticed him no more
than she was heeding the spider on her lace sleeve this
minute, who had never cast a glance at his eager paint-
ing in the very shadow of her house, summer after sum-
mer, now was the first visitor at home who wanted to
see his work. Could it be simply because he had studied
a year in Paris that she looked upon him as worthy of
her notice?

"Oh, do let me see them too!" exclaimed the pug-
nosed, smug-faced Mrs. Odiome. "I am very much
interested in art." ^

Peter was not in a mood to spread out the studies
that he had painted in the sweat of his brow before
Mrs; Odiome; but Mrs. Montague's exacting glance he
could not refuse. So he took his precious portfolio out
of his room and threw one canvas after the other on to
the parlor floor so that the ladies looked down on a car-
pet of painted figures and faces.

Mrs. Montague whisked up her lorgfnette and looked
down with sharp studiousness.

"That's the best," she remarked at last, pointing
with her parasol at a portrait study of his favorite
models a gaunt boy with high cheek-bones and hungry
eyes.

"I think it's the best, too," said Peter with a sudden
joy.

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"This IS good, too/' Mrs. Montague went on, point-
ing at a girl in a peasant dress. "The posture is a little
wooden, though, and the right arm is a trifle stiff —
don't you think so?"

She looked at him with a masterful smile as if she
would say : "My eye is infallible ; I know what is good !'*

"I do think so," said Peter. "And I think you are a
connoisseur."

Mrs. Montague fixed her green eyes on Peter,

"I want to hear what you think of a little genre picture
I have just bought, by Francis Greenleaf. It's curious,
it's — ^well, I want to hear your opinion first. Come to
see it some afternoon — ^and me too, incidentally, Mr,
Loring."

Harold's mother had asked him, Peter, to call on her !
Strange, strange world, so transformed by one year
abroad! And he was Mr. Loring now and worthy
of her cool, enigmatic smiles, he who as Peter, the
insignificant friend of Harold's had played On her
veranda !

When Mrs. Montague had glided out of the house,
followed by the smiling and bowing Mrs. Odiorne, it
seemed to Peter as if she had left behind an aroma in-
haled by a sixth sense, a fragrance of sharp spice such,
as had whiffed by him in the old world and he had
missed on his return. The little green feather on her
hat made him homesick for Paris.

Only for a moment this wave overwhelmed his spirit.
Then he stepped out on to the porch and breathed in
the sea-air and the warm cheering scent of hay : welcome
breaths of home ! The peonies were in full bloom in the
garden and the grass, the leaves on the apple tree and

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the hedges, were green with a young and rain-washed hue.
Peter was ardently aware, all at once, that he belonged
here, on this very spot, as nowhere else in the wide
world ; he was reminded of the giant in Greek fable who
lost strength when his foot was not touching Mothei*
Earth ; it seemed to him now that if an Archangel should
offer him Paris with its treasures, its history, its allure-
ments in one hand and his home town In the other, he
would refuse Paris with ia shrug of his shoulders and
greedily snatch his native soil.

There was Peter's father strolling down the street,
with his hat off to let the mild breeze play in his gray hair
and gazing round with a timid look of joy.

"We must tell father about Mrs. Montague,** said
Peter's mother, stepping up behind him.

And as they all lingered on the porch in the wicker
chairs, Peter's mother told his father about Mrs. Mon-
tague's approval of Peter's work.

"And she isn't easily impressed, you know,'* she added
eagerly.

"I guess Mrs. Montague is the only one who can judge
painting here," said Peter's father wistfully.

It seemed to Peter that his father was just a little
proud of him after all, because he had won a students'
prize in Paris and because his teacher M. Sardot had
praised his work, but there was still an air of doubt and
wonder when his father spoke of painting as if it were a
necromantic art.

"When the Greys come back in the fall," said Peter's
mother, "they will be interested. Eleanor Grey has
acquired a great taste for art abroad. I don't know
about Virginia."

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"I do/' said Peter. "Virginia has an artist's eye/'

"Let me see,** pondered Peter's mother. "How long
ago is it that we saw them last?"

"Oh, I haven't seen Virginia since she was sixteen/'
Peter replied. "Except for those hurried three weeks
two summers ago . . . They didn't turn up in Paris,
after all."

Peter thought of evenings in Paris when long
shadows would fall on his drawings, and his roaming
fancy would make Virginia knock at the door of his
dreary little room and step in with gay laughter. If
he had not been a dutiful, slaving art student feeding
on pocket-money from his father, he would have flown
to Italy and swooped down on Virginia instead of wait-
ing for her to visit him in dreams.

"I do hope they are really going to stay here now,"
said Peter's mother. "This wandering life can't be very
good for Virginia. The whole last winter in Davos —
think how dreary for a young child !"

If Virginia were only coming back in June to help
him over these summer months of deciding where to go,
of waiting for some illuminating sign that should point
out the right course for him to take! Perhaps, to be
sure, if Virginia should come back now after her long
sojourn abroad, they would find each other strangers
and it was folly to feed his fancy on children's caprices.
But, after all, the hour in Miss Qarissa's garden was a
bond that could not be broken !

"Peter, where jre you?" his mother broke into hisi
meditation. "There's Elsie Robins bowing to you across
the street, and you aren't even looking!"

"Dear me !" exclaimed Peter, bowing back to a group

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of muslin apparitions. "I had quite forgotten her exist-
ence !"

"That's not kind of you/* said his mother. **They
say Dick is growing more and more devoted to her
every day/'

"Poor Dick!" sighed Peter.

"Poor Dick !'* repeated his mother, astonished. "Why
poor? There isn't another sotd in GuUport who would
say 'poor Dick' !"

Peter wished that he had been more discreet: how
could he explain this sudden wave of pity for the smug
bourgois life of a doctor in a small town?

"Well/' he began. "He has two more long years of
medical school — ^and then he'll probably just stay round
here . . . there's no more adventurer's blood in him
now ... I guess he'll follow his father's footsteps and
help doctor our town/*

"A very good useful life that is/* said Peter's father
with the mild undertone of reproach that Peter knew
well.

"Dick missed you so at Christmas and in the spring
vacation/' said Peter's mother, no doubt scenting the
wistful flutter in the air. "I hope you'll see a great deal
of him this summer."

"Fll go this minute," said Peter, "and have a game
of tennis before dark/'

Dick! As Peter sauntered down the street in his
tennis shoes, swinging his racket, it seemed as if he
were ten years old, going to romp with his playmate.
They were going to play together, and talk about play
and fun for the next day and the gossip of the town.
And it was the same with Ted Raffles and Timothy

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Simpkins and the others — ^all except Red Mike who was
working out West — ^as Peter had found out in the first
three days at home: they were all jolly good friends
and played and joked as in school days, but they never
guessed or cared what force drove him and his col-
leagues in Paris to the master's studio in the g^ay of
early morning and kindled fire in their eyes as they dis-
puted over their ruby-red Chianti in the little Italian
inn. Those in Paris were his colleagues who never
cared whence he came or who his kin might be, asking
only if his goal were theirs ; these here were his friends
and asked for no more ethereal bond than a common
childhood and a common home.

Peter was roused by a gruff familiar voice from
across the street. Whom could Mr. Woodfin be talk-
ing to— he who always walked alone and seldom on a
street? A great, broad-shouldered fellow with a rough
brown moustache and a rollicking gait was talking in a
loud penetrating voice to the painter. Peter crossed
the road and came upon them.

"Here's my son Jack !" said Mr. Woodfin with a glow
of pride.

To be sure, that was Jack Woodfin, only broader,
ruddier and more swaggering than when Peter had seen
him last, four or five years ago.

"Well, I'm glad to find one of my sort," exclaimed
Jack Woodfin, shaking hands heartily with Peter. "I'm
a black sheep here."

"Have you brought any of your work?" asked Peter
eagerly.

"Only three or four things," Jack Woodfin replied.
"To show the old man."

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"Come and see them/' said his father. "They're
worth looking at."

When father and son had passed by, it occurred to
Peter that this was the first invitation to his old teach-
er's home that he had ever received, and besides it
seemed as if the painter's rough face had been trans-
figured. He was proud of his son ! When would Peter's
father be proud of his son — or rather, would he ever
be proud of his son, even if Peter won all the gold
medals in the world? His meditations were cut off by
Dick's jovial voice:

"Hallo, old chap ! Glad you've come !"

And as he entered the gate of the Taylors' yard,
Peter left behind him all cares and doubts and entered
the green land of boyhood where a life work was of no
moment and only play mattered at all.

In this happy land Peter gamboled for the rest of the
week and it seemed to him as if he might play tennis
and swim and sail to the end of his life, if only the sum-
mer would last forever.

But the time would come when the laughing days
would g^ow shorter and leaves would fall and Peter
would be a stray artist not knowing whither to turn —
so he reflected on a g^ay day as he watched the fine
drizzling rain from his window.

"Peter, Peter !" the rain seemed to mutter on the roof.
"Where will you be three months from now, Peter?"

He would go to the Woodfins today and at least
hear about work and feel where he belonged.

The walk along the woods in the monotonous rain to
Mr. Woodfin's cottage seemed like a walk from one
world into another. The rain dripped from the leaves

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of the beeches as he entered the wood and a faint wind
made them rustle; all else was calm.

Peter knocked with the knocker on the door of the
cottage, and when a deep voice had bidden him enter,
he stepped into the hall where father and son were sit-
ting opposite each other, smoking their pipes and musing
before a blazing open fire.

"Peter!" cried the older artist. "Welcome this dull
day ! Come and cheer up a stupid family."

"Stupid!" repeated Jack Woodfin, as he drew up a
chair to the fire for Peter. "It's been lively up to the
last five minutes. I've been trying to persuade father
to come with me to Munich, and he was thinking it
over and just on the point of accepting when you came
m "

Mr. Woodfin senior started up.

"I never thought for a moment of going there," he
protested sullenly. "What should I do in a foreign coun-
try, where I don't even know the language? I'm too
old to be a vagabond like Jack."

"Only life for an artist !" declared Jack Woodfin gaily,
as he tossed a mighty log into the fire. "You must
come, Loring, of course. Munich's the only place for
you. You've had Paris now. You'll have a happier
life in Munich than in New York."

"I hadn't thought of going to New York particularly,"
said Peter blandly.

"Man !" cried Jack Woodfin. "You aren't going to
stay here in New England !"

"Why not?" said Peter helplessly. "I haven't decided
yet where 111 go."

"Whatever you do," said the young painter, "don't

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stay in this our dear GuUport. I never feel a stranger
anywhere except when I come back here and walk on
the prim little streets in the home of my youth, and
everybody turns and stares at me as if I were a high-
wayman."

"You've been away so long," said Peter, wondering
if some day he would have to come home a stranger to
his home town.

"You have a nice way of talking to your host. Jack,"
said the older Mr. Woodfin. "And its rarely enough
that you honor me.''

"I'm not talking about your hermitage," returned his
son. "This is the most blessed spot on earth — ^isn't it,
Loring?"

Peter assented and looked round: the hall where they
were sprawling round the fire was at the same time
living-room and studio. Three easels stood round with
sketches on them — studies of cliffs, reflections on sand—
and canvases lay heaped up in every corner; pipes,
palettes, mahlsticks were strewn about; the only vase
was a tall copper goblet holding paint-brushes instead
of flowers ; the curtain that separated the hall from the
little dining-room beyond was a great fisherman's net.
But on the wall opposite the big window hung a glori-
ous painting of surf in a rainstorm, and over the fire-
place a portrait of Jack Woodfin's mother. This was
the first time that Peter had been offered a chair in the
house of his teacher who had never invited him to linger
when Peter had come to make plans for sketching
excursions. Perhaps the painter wanted to keep his
cottage a sanctuary for the picture of his wife ; perhaps
he did not want to break the spell of his hermit's way

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of living; perhaps he merely did not want an outsider
to pry upon the disorder of his studio.

"You must have a fine time painting here in win-
ter," said Peter, looking enviously at the big window.

"Well," said the older Mr. Woodfin hoarsely, "I've
worked in here for thirty-five years and don't intend to
work anywhere else."

"I'll grant that father has a right to stay here if he
insists," said Jack Woodfin to Peter. "But for you it
would be wrong and foolish."

"As bad as that?" said Peter anxiously, for he felt
suddenly as if someone were pulling him up, like an
ivy plant by many tender little roots, from his dear
native soil.

"I mean it," said the young painter. "You'll never
get any thanks for your work here. Evep if they buy
your pictures, if you happen to be fashionable — I mean
in Boston, of course, not in this dear town — ^well, even
if they do buy your pictures, they won't care about
them any more than they do for embroidered sofa
cushions."

Peter was silent.

"But in Munich," Jack Woodfin continued, "in
Munich they love, live — ^breathe art. Munich is art In
Munich, whether you sell your pictures or not, every-
body knows why you're painting them."

The ardent fire in his dark eyes changed all at once
into a jolly sparkle. "And the fun you can have in
Munich — why, there's nothing like it here. The nights
at the cafe . . . Carnival . • . costume balls and studio
revels . . ."

"Everything that I might have had in Paris," said

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Peter, while his pulse b^;an to beat faster, "if I hadn't
slaved so."

"You couldn't have had the same time in Paris," said
Jack Woodfin. "They're especial Munich times. But
you haven't lost your chance. Make up your mind now,
and come back with me this fall."

'lie would have to ask his father first," said Mr.
Woodfin.

In that moment Peter wished that he were inde-
pendent, a gay vagabond like Jack Woodfin, instead of a
beginner feeding out of his father's hand.

"Show me some of your work!" he said abruptly,
turning to Jack Woodfin. "Let me see what Munich
can do!"

Without hesitation young Woodfin plunged into a
dark place beneath the stairs and brought out an arm-
ful of canvases, which he held into the light, one by
one, for Peter's benefit.

"Oh!" gasped Peter at the sight of the first one, a
sketch of a laughing boy, a ragamuffin with a bare,
brown neck and straggly black hair falling over his
irresistibly mischievous eyes. There was something like
a brisk wind about this sketch, something gay, reck-
less, dashing that shot a pang of honest admiration —
and envy, too — ^through Peter's heart. And the other
sketches all had the magic of the first and made Peter
speechless.

"Have you had enough?" asked the young artist,
laughing as he held up a portrait of himself with his
palette and pipe.

"No, go on, go on!" said Peter, and when the exhibi-
tion was over, he drew a deep sigh and declared:

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"There must be something in Munich, after all/'

Jack Woodfin laughed boisterously.

"Youll go there yet," he cried "If not now, some
time, surely."

It was with a heavy heart and at the same time a
curiously elated spirit that Peter left his friends of the
hermitage to tramp in the dreary rain to the land that
knew no painters. How could he ever suggest Munich
to his father and mother, now that he had barely
returned from Paris? His mother would cry because he
wanted to go away so far again ; his father would be as-
tonished at his audacity. Peter wondered how his father
and mother happened to have such a rebellious son when
they might as well have had a dutiful, normal one like
Dick, willing to take up his father's profession and stay in
his home town for the rest of his days. And yet Peter's
life at home, since his return from Paris, had been as
peaceful and happy as it had been when he was ten years
old.

During the bright, sunny days that followed, Peter
never spoke at home of his visit to the hermitage, and
frolicked with Dick and Ted Raffles, when all the while
a great question mark was branding his heart. Peter
knew that he must begin to work again, that it was a sin
of omission to waste the golden summer days in play
when sparkling blues and rich greens and sunset gleams
of crimson and purple were clamoring to be held fast on
canvas. For as Peter had always sketched in the sum-
mer, since the days of Miss Runkle, he could not under-
stand why this summer it should be so hard to begin ; per-
haps in Paris he had grown too used to colleagues, to
shop talk.

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It was on a dazzling afternoon, when he was strolling
about Green Shore all alone, that Peter remembered Mrs.
Montague's invitation to see her new acquisition. Why
not go now ? Harold was away at a house-party, and so
would not laugh at him for suddenly making a formal
call on his mother. And Harold's father was away for
always, because, as Peter's mother had hold him, the
Montagues had at last been divorced for "incompatibility
of temper." And, though tongues wagged with malicious
gossip, it seemed small wonder to Peter that they should
have been ill-mated, as a full-blood steed and a mule can-
not be yoked together.

Peter's heart beat as he walked up the steep stairway to
the high veranda of Mira Mare, as if he had never
played there at hide-and-seek and marbles.

"Is Mrs. Montague in?" That was a question he
had surely never asked before.

In the drawing-room hung the charming airy land-
scapes that Peter had admired since his boyhood, grace-
ful vases stood about, holding roses, and the rugs that
he walked on had delicate designs in purplish gray. The
famous view of the sea that he had seen countless times
from the veranda startled him, as he saw it now, framed
by the window.

"Mira Mare!" he said to himself, aloud.

"Oh, Mr. Loring !" a crisp metallic voice startled him
out of his revery. "Why are you calling the name of my
house? Is it for a blessing or for a curse?"

"A blessing for me, Mrs. Montague," said Peter, and
started as he remembered that this was Harold's mother,
from whom he used to hide when he had come to play.

"You want to see my little Greenleaf," said Mrs.

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Montague. "I am so fond of it, I have hung it in my
own little boudoir. Come, I'll show you "

Peter followed her through the adjoining rooms to a
retreat that, small, dainty, held a divan covered with a
fantastically embroidered scarf and a desk and graceful
chairs of light maple wood. Over the divan, on the pale
wallpaper, hung a small painting in delicate tints, of
nymphs with fluttering veils and gauzy garments dancing
on a dewy field in the mist.

"What do you think of it?" asked Mrs. Montague.

"Excellent!" said Peter, and found himself wonder-
ing if the painter of this picture were a special protege
of Mrs. Montague's.

"Greenleaf is an old man, now," said his hostess. "This
is one of his earlier works."

"I thought I had heard about all the younger men,"
said Peter, with a mysterious sense of relief. After all,
the painting, though it had great charm, did not impress
Peter like Jack Woodfin's work, and it did not seem to
him very modem.

"I am interested in the young men," said Mrs. Montague,
as she led Peter out onto the veranda by an arras-door
from the boudoir. A light breeze played with the frail
fabric of her pale green gown, and the dazzling sunlight
sparkled on the diamonds at her ears. Her neck seemed to
him in this moment very white and swan-like, and her
haughty profile rare and queenly; if he only had palette,
brush and canvas here this minute before the perfect pose
should be spoiled by a hair-breadth's turning of the neck!

"You know," began the model of his imagination, "my
sister has been urging me for a long time to have my por-
trait painted."

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The blood fled from Peter's cheeks as if sucked out by
a demoniac force : had she read in his ardent look that he
was longing to paint her portrait and had she spoken
only to mock him? The silence was awkward, and he
knew that he must make some polite remark.

'You're a fine subject!" he exclaimed honestly; but he
would have liked to compliment his queenly hostess more
brilliantly. Altogether he felt like a clumsy boy.

They sat down on the breezy side of the veranda, and
looked out over the dazzling blue.

"Artists think I'm an easy subject/' said Mrs. Mon-
tague lightly. "But they soon find out, when they're
working at me, that I'm very hard to do— especially my
eyes."

She turned her sea-green, mocking, cold yet absorb-
ing eyes upon him, and it seemed to Peter that to catch
their gleam and meaning was indeed a Herculean task.

"I thought of asking Greenleaf," Mrs. Montague con-
tinued, and these words annoyed Peter. "Of qourse, he
has a great charm — ^your friend, Mr. Atherton, thinks so
too."

Maurice Atherton, to be sure ! Peter had not seen the
philosopher for two years, the year that he had taken
a leave of absence to work in Oxford, and the year that
Peter himself had spent in Paris. And now all at once
he understood what had always puzzled him as a boy —
why Mr. Atherton chose to be the guest of Mrs. Mon-
tague.

"But, you see," Peter's hostess went on, as he made no
reply, "Greenleaf is growing old, and although he paints
wood-nymphs with great delicacy — ^yet, you will admit,
I'm no wood-nymph."

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"No, you're a sea-nymph," said Peter, and then started,
as he remembered that he was talking with an acquaint-
ance of his mother's whom he had always shunned.

But Mrs. Montague laughed a short, cool, mocking
laugh.

"Should you like to try?" she asked, abruptly, "You
know I always favor youth."

Was the wide ocean spinning round Peter with myriads
of dazzling ripples, that he should have grown dizzy all
at once, as if he had been dancing too long? Had he
heard real words, or only the murmuring of the tide on
the pebbles below?

"Do you mean," he stammered, "do you mean that I
shall paint your portrait?"

"If you want to," Mrs. Montague answered, with an
ironic smile.

Peter rose in his excitement, as if he were setting out
on an adventure.

"When do you want me to start?" he cried.

"Any time, soon," she replied, gracefully shrugging her
shoulders. "While the sunshine lasts, I thought I should
like to be done on the veranda with the sea as back-
ground."

"Tomorrow !" cried Peter, eagerly, for it seemed as if
he could not wait so long.

"Oh, you are zealous !" exclaimed Mrs. Montague, with
a gesture of protest. "Next week will be time enough.
Suppose we say next week — Monday. Then, perhaps,
you'll come round some morning this week, and we'll de-
cide on the gown "

"A study in green and blue !" Peter declared. "That's
what I should like to make it."

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"I see you have ideas of your own/* said Mrs. Mon-
tague, with an indulgent smile. "I hope, though, that
you won't be so engrossed in your harmonic color scheme
that you'll forget to consider the likeness."

"Oh, no, no !" declared Peter. "The colors would only
help to bring out your most real self."

"That sounds very ambitious/' laughed his model-to-
be, and rose as a sign for Peter, who was already stand-
ing, to take his leave.

When Peter took her cool hand as he said good-by, he
felt as if he were holding the hand of a prophetess who
had marked out his path. Whatever might happen after-
wards, this was the first order that he had received in his
life — ^and what an order it was !

Peter's mother was not a little flattered by the news, and
even his father was pleased; an order for a portrait
so near at home, so respectable, so altogether satisfac-
tory, could not but gratify them both. And Peter lived
in a delirium, counting the slothful days that separated
him from his task, painting a glittering picture in his
mind. When Jack Woodfin, whom he met in the harbor,
asked him to go on a short sketching cruise with him and
his father, Peter refused, as casually as possible, because
he was making preparations for a portrait of Mrs. Mon-
tague, whereupon Jack Woodfin congratulated him with a
mischievous twinkle in his eyes.

"You're a lucky dog!" he said, "to fish the only order
to be had in this nest. But can't you go sketching just
the same— or is she going to pose every day?"

"Twice a week/' said Peter. "I'll go sketching with
you in between the sittings."

"Don't let her boss you too much," Jack Woodfin called

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after Peter, as he passed on. "Don't forget to do what
you want to do, even if you don't flatter."

In that moment his colleague's patronizing tone an-
noyed Peter a little, as, indeed, everything annoyed him
except the ideal portrait in his mind.

At last the day dawned. It was a dazzling, auspicious
day, with white, feathery clouds on a bright sky. The
hours crawling toward the appointed time Peter spent in
an idle review of his tools, and when at last he found
himself, laden with paint-box and easel, tramping across
the causeway from GuUport to Green Shore, it seemed
as if he were walking across the causeway from his old
life to his new. He was now no longer a student, he now
would stand with his foot in the real world — even though
this real world was manifest in Green Shore, the play-
ground of his boyhood !

Half an hour later he stood in front of his easel on the
veranda of Mira Mare, fixing his eyes on his model. Mrs.
Montague was reclining languidly in a wicker chair, one
foot on a footstool, one elbow resting on the arm of the
chair; one slender, nervous hand was playing with a
long chain of jade in her lap. The sea in the background
was a gleaming, piercing blue, the sky purest turquoise,
the dress that fell in gauzy folds a pale, cool green.

"A study in blue and green, eh?" said the model, in her
mocking voice.

"Yes," replied Peter ; "now I must catch you just the
way I see you this moment "

"I am not running away," she returned ; "you look as
if I were ; I am sitting painfully still."

"Yes," said Peter, but could talk no more ; so feverish
was his haste in laying the foundation to this work, that

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he was breathless, as if he were nmning a race. Oh, if
the charcoal drawing were only done, so that he might
begin to paint !

"Don't turn— this way— no, to the right— that's it!"
He forgot that the glittering model before him was an
older lady, a friend of his mother's, and not a model in
his master's studio.

"Raise the left hand a little — stop— no more !"

"You're a despotic painter," said Mrs. Montague, "and
ferociously silent. I have been looking forward to a little
gossip of artists and Paris."

"Wait till I get to your eyes," answered Peter, "then
it will be good to have you talk *'

"That's polite!" exclaimed Mrs. Montague, and broke
out into gay laughter.

"I don't care if I'm polite or not," said Peter. "I don't
care about anything in the world except this picture."

"What an inspired young Leonardo!" his model re-
marked, with a smile of irony.

The name of Leonardo shot through Peter like a strong
current and seemed to kindle his hands with a fiery swift-
ness. Was he not painting his enigmatic Mona Lisa?

The tide murmured below, the tide rose from low tide
to high tide and covered the boulders on the beach, yet
Peter heard nothing and saw nothing but his model in
green and her background of blue.

"Why, my dear, still patience on a monument" — a
shrill voice broke into the quiet. "How do you do, Pet^
Mr. Loring, I should say."

It was Harold's Aunt Hettie who came swooping down
on them.

"Well, let me see what you have done so far."

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"Don't— don't look yet/' cried Peter; "It's only just
barely begun. You mustnH look !"

The lank, august Aunt Hettie seemed startled by his
ardor, and indicated by the raising of her eyebrows that
his tone was not quite correct.

"At any rate, you will let my sister rest, I trust," she
said, turning away from the easel. "It is almost one
o'clock."

"I've been martyr to the cause of my own beauty," said
Mrs. Montague, rising with a sigh and stretching her
arms.

"I hope we can go on tomorrow at the same time," said
Peter. "The l^ght wouldn't be the same this afternoon."

"Man !" cried his model. "This afternoon ! What are
you thinking of? You know, I promised you only two
mornings a week !"

Peter hung his head. He wondered what Mrs. Mon-
tague had to do in her mornings that was half as im-
portant or alluring as to sit in the sunlight and be a daz-
zling study in green and blue. But there was no help, and
the canvas, as yet but crudely covered with the work of
his feverish hands, had to be stowed away in a secret
recess in the hall of Mira Mare. Peter declined an invi-
tation to stay for luncheon — ^he scarcely knew why : per-
haps because he did not want to talk with Harold's Aunt
Hettie on indifferent topics, or because he could not bear
to see his model torn from her harmonizing background.

"I have faith in your brush!" were Mrs. Montague's
parting words in a serious tone, though her eyes were
still mocking, as she looked down at him from the high
veranda of Mira Mare.

From that moment Peter lived in a kind of stupor, his

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mind one sparkling field of green and blue, and when he
was looking at his mother or Didc or Dr. Taylor or Ted
Raffles or a fisherman on the street, he was all the while
seeing only the one rare, sharp face in half profile, only
one pair of cool, green eyes with secrets in their depths.

The next sitting was even more absorbing than the
first, though he felt more at ease, and the third was the
most intense of all. For he had now reached the point
when he had to hold fast the flickering gleam in those
green eyes, and try to guess their meaning. Mrs. Mon-
tague gossiped about artists in Paris and New York, and
as she spoke lightly of one after the other, her narrow,
haughty lips curled in irony.

"Gorton — Oh, yes, I knew him when he was a young
man," she was saying of an exhibitor at the Salon. "His
things are clever enough, but rather too brisk, too ex-
uberant, like someone who talks too fast — don't you
think so? And he certainly makes all his women's necks
an inch too thick/'

Peter looked at the neck on his canvas and then at his
model's, and saw to his satisfaction that he had missed
none of its grace and slenderness. But the eyes — ^the
eyes were his despair! Why was she always censuring
or mocking, so that he could never penetrate to the bot-
tom of those green pools ?

"I wonder if Harold will like your picture," said Peter,
a few minutes later, thinking aloud.

He glanced up at his model and saw that curious, dark
shadows troubled the lucid pools of her eyes.

"He will think it flattering of his old mother," she said
gaily, and the shadows in her eyes fled before a gleam of
bitter sarcasm.

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Did she dislike to talk about her son? Peter remem-
bered now that Harold from his earliest childhood had
spoken with resignation of "the Mater," and that in his
college years he had rarely stayed more than three weeks
at home. Peter thought of his own mother, who talked of
nothing with so much relish as her son, and for the first
time he seemed to feel again the uncanny presence of a
green serpent that had chilled him so often in his boyhood,
when Harold's mother had come near. Moreover, he
knew that Harold's mysterious house-parties were often
no house-parties at all, but yachting trips with his dull,
silent father.

A new idea leaped into Peter's mind: if he should
speak of Mrs. Montague's divorced husband and rouse
bitter memories in her mind, would he at last be able to
read the whole meaning of her enigmatic face — that
hieroglyphic scroll given him to interpret? But no!
Rather would he stay puzzled than risk this proud lady's
displeasure !

At the end of the sitting, when Peter stepped back to
take a critical view of his morning's work, he was startled
to find how remote he was still from his goal.

While he was staring at the canvas, disappointed and
impatient at the slow work of his pace, he was aware
of Mrs. Montague standing behind him ; he fancied that
he heard her breath in the silence.

"Why so grave?" she asked, in a voice that was milder
and more endearing than usual.

"It's such difficult work," said Peter. "I'm not satis-
fied."

Again there was silence, and strangely the breathing
beside him seemed louder than the murmur of the sea.

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There was something myterious about this breathing,
something that made his own breath come and go with
unwonted swiftness. He did not turn round, but bent
over the picture to retouch a line on the chin. All at once
he felt something like the touch of a butterfly on his fore-
head. . . . But the butterfly did not flit away : a kiss was
burning on Peter's brow !

"A kiss of the Muse !" said Mrs. Montague playfully,
with a light of triumph in her cold eyes. "You must not
lose faith in her so soon."

Peter gazed at Mrs. Montague, his mother's acquaint-
ance and Harold's mother; he gazed, and clumsy boor
that he was, he did not know what to do. But a current
had shot through him and he was vibrating still from its
force: Mrs. Montague had kissed him! Was it a
maternal salute from Harold's mother? Never! Peter
had never seen Mrs. Montague kiss her own son, and
besides, there was nothing maternal about her. No: she
had done it because it had pleased her to kiss him, be-
cause she wanted to — ^because

"I adore you !" Peter heard himself cry out.

Then he felt his lips rain feverish kisses on a cool, im-
mobile hand, and when he raised his head and looked
straight into Mrs. Montague's gleaming, mocking eyes, it
seemed as if he must have grown ten years older in the
last Ave minutes.

He walked home elated by a sense new to him, a sense
quite different from any pride he had felt before — ^the
enticing aroma left in his spirit by flattery. The marvel-
ous five minutes on the veranda of Mira Mare were
sealed on his mind; the very kiss on his forehead he
seemed to feel like a scar with a delicious pain. The days

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before the next sitting were full of impatient waiting
and suspense.

Peter went sketching with the Woodfins, but, to his
annoyance, he could give Jack Woodfin but a poor idea of
his work.

"Your mind isn't in it," said Peter's old teacher,
hoarsely.

"I dare say," replied Peter, as he watched Jack
Woodfin daub on his bright reds and blues in dashing
strokes.

"I guess his mind is on the portrait he's painting," said
the younger artist, with an impertinent laugh. "Is she
handsome?"

Peter pretended not to hear, and painted on auto-
matically, though he knew that his harbor sketch looked
like a patchwork quilt.

How could these rough Woodfins, good souls and ex-
cellent painters though they were, understand the com-
plex, delicate and yet ponderous task of painting Mrs.
Montague's portrait?

' The task grew more and more ponderous as it drew
nearer to completion. Any harmless "Isn't the nose just
a little too long?" or "Isn't the mouth a little too red?"
from Harold's Aunt Hettie drove him to the brink of
despair. The model there before him glittering, brightly
alive, veiled only by the blurring atmospheric gauze of
the hot June day, and the hard, lusterless study in green
and blue on his canvas — ^how far apart they were !

"I've never been taken so seriously before," said Mrs.
Montague. "You make me feel like a page in history."

"I want to immortalize you," said Peter. "That's what
I'm trying so hard to do."

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"Let me go down to posterity amiably/' said the model.
**Don't paint all my sins/'

Alas, Peter knew too well that he had neither guessed
her sins nor solved the riddle in her eyes any more than
on the first day of his portrait painting. It was not for
him to read the meaning of this scroll, but to copy it faith-
fully in letters of green and blue.

At last came the day at Mira Mare when Peter laid
down his palette and brush, stepped bade briskly and let
his arms dangle at his sides in a luxury of sudden
idleness.

"Done !" he announced. "I'm not going to touch it any
more."

Mrs. Montague rose with a sigh of relief. Then
she swept over to his side and studied her own
image silently for a long, long time, to Peter a time
of torture.

"You've done well," she said, at last, laying her hand
lightly on his arm. "It has turned out much better than
I ever expected. I am satisfied, and I trust you are,
too."

"It isn't so bad, after all," said Peter. "But I can't
say I'm satisfied. I wish . . ."

He hesitated, and Mrs. Montague said with the gleam
of triumph in her eyes that he had seen once before :

"What is it?"

"How dull life will be without you!" Peter cried.
"How shall I stand it?"

Mrs. Montague smiled languidly.

"'My house is yours and all that it contains,' as the
Spaniards say," she replied. "If I am no longer a model
— can't I be a friend?"

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"Oh!" cried Peter, in happy confusion. "Will you—
may I. . . . My best friend !"

They shook hands lingeringly.

"Thank you ! Thank you !'' Peter stammered vaguely,
as he tore himself away.

On his way home from Green Shore — for the last time
laden with easel and paint-box — Mrs. Montague's last
words and his answer reverberated in his mind. "My
best friend!" How fervently these words had escaped
him. But now, as he was slowly walking along the cause-
way, it became quite clear to him that Mrs. Montague was
no friend at all, but something quite different — something
unstable, absorbing that made her image lurk in the back-
ground of his mind when he was away from her, and
made him strangely alert and expectant when he was in
her sight.

When Peter's mother from her doorstep called down :
"Is it done?" he could only reply with a half-hearted
"Yes."

"And is she satisfied ?" his mother went on, eagerly.

"Yes, she was quite satisfied," said Peter, languidly.

"Thdi why aren't you enthusiastic?" asked his mother.

"I am very enthusiastic," Peter replied coolly, reluctant
to talk about Mrs. Montague to his mother.

The next day Mrs. Montague invited Peter and his par-
ents to dine with her and celebrate the completing of the
portrait which stood, yet unframed, on an ornamental
easel in the parlor. Never had this brilliant model been
so dazzling and spirited before, and above all, her wit and
gaiety were addressed more to Peter than to his father
and mother.

"When my friends from town come to visit me," said

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Mrs. Montague, when they were bidding her good-by,
**they will be anxious to meet you, after seeing the pic-
ture. Do you feel equal to any more old ladies, Mr. Lor-
ingr

"I shall be glad of any excuse to come to Mira Mare,*'
Peter exclaimed, though he felt a little as if he were play-
ing a part before his parents while the memory of yes-
terday's intimate tete-a-tete was glowing in his mind.

To know that his visits were sought by so haughty and
distinguished a lady enhanced Peter's days of familiar
work and sport, and it seemed to him that life must have
been dull indeed before Mrs. Montague turned from Har-
old's mother into the lady of the portrait in blue and
green. It was not a little embarrassing for Peter when
he received his cheque, for although he was very proud to
show his father that he had earned a good sum by his
labor, he felt as if some of the glamor of his new bond
with the lady of Mira Mare had been rubbed off by such
a sordid transaction. Yet, when he called on Mrs. Mon-
tague, the charm of their intercourse was untroubled.

Untroubled it was, to be sure, but not calm. Though
the exquisiteness of the moment when the "kiss of the
Muse" had burned on his forehead was never again ap-
proached, there was always during Peter's calls at Mira
Mare something heavy in the air, like moisture before a
thunderstorm, or, rather, as there was no danger of a
storm, like the heavy scent of a fading rose. Then, on
his homeward walks across the causeway, he would look
out over the sea and wonder what the winter would bring
and if it would take him far away from Mira Mare.

But one mellow August day, during one of his calls,
Mrs. Montague said to him :

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"I have something to tell you which might interest
you."

Peter looked up at her in suspense.

"Mrs. Gay — ^you know, Mrs. Odiome's cousin — and
Mrs. Doran, that little bird-like woman who was her^ last
Sunday," Mrs. Montague went on, "both were so enam-
ored of my portrait that they want you to paint them, too."

Peter did not try to conceal his pleasure.

"Do they want them done now — soon?" he asked
eagerly.

"No," she replied, "they want their solid winter back-
groimds. Mrs. Gay has a favorite chair, and Mrs. Doran
a becoming portiere that will have to be in the portraits.
... I told them I wasn't at all sure if you wouldn't be in
Paris or Munich or in New York this autumn."

Here was the sign for which he had been waiting: two
orders for the winter in Boston, so near his home ! He
knew well and hardly needed Mrs. Montague's assurance
that one order would naturally lead to another.

"And then I may see you in the winter?" Peter asked
enthusiastically.

Mrs. Montague turned on Peter a penetrating glance of
her clear, green eyes, and smiled in her sphinx-like way.

"I couldn't endure a winter without these calls," Peter
went on, encouraged by her eloquent silence. "Every-
thing else seems so dull ..."

It seemed to him that now, under the eyes of his god-
dess, his work would be truly inspired.

"Every picture I shall paint shall be painted for you!"
Peter declared.

"Oh, but not Mrs. Odiome's, pl^ise/' laughed Mrs.
Montague.

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"Of course, I would rather paint you in a new pose
every week/' said Peter. "But, anyway, I am very
happy!"

Not till he had left Mira Mare did it occur to Peter
how pleased his father and mother would be by his new
opportunity.

Peter was right : his mother fell on his neck and cried
for joy, because her boy could stay so near home.

"Then you'll come to see us every month, at least," she
cried. "And — ^and it'll be such a relief to know that
you'll be with such nice people all the time. I was really
a little worried in Paris."

Peter laughed gaily at his mother, but when he told the
news to his father, he saw the same look of relief on his
face.

"I am glad this path is opened to you, Peter," he said,
in his subdued voice. "I was really anxious, wonder-
ing what would become of you this winter. And it is
pleasant to know that you will be in such good com-
pany."

So there was satisfaction all round, and Peter felt like
a man complete. As the cloud of anxiety for his immedi-
ate future was lifted from his spirit, he was in a mood
for festivities, and as he was invited to parties more than
in previous summers, he began to flirt with the girls of
Gullport, so that Dick said to him one night as they
walked home from a dance together:

"You're getting to be quite a lady-killer, Peter. You
must be practicing for next winter."

But at heart Peter found these flirtations insipid and
tiresome compared with the priceless hours at Mira Mare,
and it was the prospect of being a frequent guest at Mrs.

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Montague's house in Boston which cast a golden glitter
over his view of the winter,

August was drawing to an end, and Jack Woodfin, who
had been Peter's sketching companion many a sunny
morning, was going to leave for Munich. As they were
sketching together for the last time, by the outskirts of the
woods one afternoon, Peter remembered with a sudden
pang of regret that visit on a rainy June day at the her-
mitage, when Jack Woodfin's work had thrilled him by
its boldness and he had rejoiced to find an inspiring col-
league. Colleague, to be sure, Jack Woodfin had been to
him during the summer, but it was from elsewhere that
Peter had drawn his inspiration.

"So you're not coming to Munich, after all,'* said Jack
Woodfin, folding his easel for the last time in his old
home this summer.

Peter shook his head.

"Nor even to New York !"

Peter shook his head again.

"I will give you one parting piece of advice," said the
brusque artist, as he strapped his easel and paint-box
together. "Don't dangle too long at a woman's apron-
strings !"

"I'm not going to stay at home with my mother,*' Peter
cried out, while he felt the blood rush into his face. "I'm
going to work in Boston."

"They needn't be your mother's," Jack Woodfin re-
plied dryly. "There are other women's apron-strings."

Peter kpew too well that Jack Woodfin was aiming this
dart at Mrs. Montague, and he swallowed this parting
advice like bitter medicine, doubly bitter because his old
teacher stood by and laughed. At the door of the hermit-

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age Peter shook hands with Jack and wished him good
luck, but there was a chill in his voice.

With a numb sense of having missed an opportunity
and of standing not too high in the esteem of a colleague,
Peter walked sulkily home, left his sketch and tools in his
room, and then, by way of distraction, strolled over to the
causeway and across to Green Shore and Mira Mare.

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THE SONG WITH STRANGE WORDS

THE rough winter was howling and beating against
the window-panes of Peter's Boston studio. He
lit a candle because he wanted to lounge and smoke a few
minutes in the restful light before he should plunge again
into the cold, dark street, and then into the heat and
glare of Mrs. Montague's reception room. The candle
light gave the easel in the comer of the room a ghostly
contour and cast a blurred cobweb glimmer over the
sketches on the wall. One evening alone in his studio
with a good book and his thoughts unscattered would be
restful indeed, and more wisely spent, no doubt, than
night after night in the drawing-room of his patronesses,
or in their boxes at the theater, or the opera. How dif-
ferent his life had been in Boston three years ago as a
faithful, plodding art student, before his year in Paris !
Then his evenings, even though he had boasted no genial
studio at that time, but only a dreary boarding-house
room, had been spent in drawing compositions, studying
anatomy and perspective, or reading about great artists of
the past, and only occasional escapades in town with art-
school companions. Peter drew in a long breath of
smoke. Polite conversation by day to the ladies who sat
for their portraits, and by night polite conversation again.

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or gay jokes and funny stories — ^what a change since those
terse, unf rilled student days ! Should he stay at home to-
night for once? It would be only a colorless wholesale
affair this evening, and he would not be missed. He drew
the engraved invitation from his pocket and scanned it
once more, holding it close to the candle. In her own
strong hand Mrs. Montague had written underneath the
formal words:

Be sure to cornel I have a surprise for you.

How could he forget this postscript — ^how could he
think of staying away and suppose that he would not be
missed ? He had not forgotten the night before last when
he had said good-by to Mrs. Montague after escorting
her to a concert, how a sudden light in her usually so cold
green eyes had darted through him with irresistible force.

"I rarely see you alone," she had said, in exquisite
reproachfulness, and Peter had bent over her hand and
kissed it with ardor. The rapture of that moment was
vibrating through him again. He would obey her siun-
mons — and it was high time, too !

Peter took his coat and hat hurriedly out of his small
adjoining bedroom, snuffed out the candle, and ran along
the silent, dark corridor and down the steep old stairs of
the studio building out into the cold night air. As he was
walking against the cold wind down Beacon Street, he
wondered what the surprise could be. Perhaps it was a
new order — ^that would fit into his plans very well, as he
had finished Mrs. Carter's portrait this morning, and Miss
Angel — ^that droll little old lady with the bobbing curls —
would not be back from the South for two or three weeks,
so that there was ample time to start another portrait.

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But after all, Mrs. Montague would not choose a big
evening festivity as the best occasion to tell him such
professional news, and Peter remained mystified

The familiar row of carriages and motor cars, the
familiar glare after the darkness of the street, the famil-
iar animated buzz after the hush of the night outside!
There they were, surging against him on the stairs, the
tide of ladies, jeweled, powdered and amiably smiling,
who would or might pose for him some day ! But in the
midst of this flood Peter caught sight of Harold who
stood in a comer, handsome and suave, with the bored
negligent air that he always affected, and let himself be
entertained by one of the few younger women, a laughing,
chattering little blonde. With a quick fleeting pang Peter
realized once more that although Mrs. Montague show-
ered her invitations upon him, he was never asked to any
of the youthful dances and dinner parties given for Har-
old; he was never given a chance as an old friend of
Harold's to mingle with the law-school men and the young
damsels who suited his age. Moreover, he was estranged
from Harold since the summer when he had painted the
portrait of Harold's mother, though the chill that had
crept between them was never made manifest in word or
look. To Peter, Harold seemed an ungrateful son who
did not know how to prize his dazzling mother, in whose
favor Peter was content to sun himself, and to Harold
Peter was no doubt "one of those artist fellows" who
pleased his mother's capricious fancy !

Peter made his way into the big reception room with
the crimson wallpaper, where the Corots and Daubignys
hung, and took his place in the line that moved slowly
toward Mrs. Montague. Queenly as always, she stood

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tinder the opalescent lampshade, with her bouquet of
curious green orchids, bending her proud, swanlike neck
of which he knew every line by heart, smiling her cool,
brilliant smile.

Whenever Mrs. Montague welcomed Peter in a large
assembly, though her words were never so cool and for-
mal, there was always a gleam in her eye— cold, passion-
less eyes, too ! — ^that seemed to say : "It is really only you
that I want to see; all the others are just so many
insects buzzing around us." And so it seemed again to-
night.

"What is my surprise?" Peter asked in a low voice,
when it was his turn to shake hands at last.

"One that you will like altogether too well," she said
with a gleam in her eyes and an odd twitch of her lips.

"You are always a surprise when I see you again I" said
Peter.

Then a stout gentleman came up and gently pushed him
aside. Peter was startled himself at the glib way in
which compliments dropped from his lips ever since
the painting of Mrs. Montague's portrait — from the lips
of the rustic boy who had always scoflFed at flattery. Was
he turning into a young man's version of Miss Fanny
Runkle?

He strolled on through th^ swarming rooms as best he
could, past the women with their unnaturally shining
eyes and garrulous lips, into a remote comer where he
could lean against a door-post and enjoy a view of Mrs.
Montague in the frame of a doorway with dark portieres
drawn aside. He was not in a mood for light and silly
talk, but he was always glad to rest his artist's eye on
beauty. Would his hostess spare him a little gay dis-

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course tonight while she fanned herself, tired from too
many forced smiles ? What could be the surprise for him
that he would like too well ?

"Why, Mr. Loring, not talking to anybody ! What is
the matter?" It was Mrs. Perkins who swept up to him
with a sugary smile on the full moon face that he knew
well, as it had been his daily work for two weeks to
glorify it on canvas.

"I was just looking,'* replied Peter. "A painter always
has an excuse for using his eyes more than his tongue —
don't you think so?"

"Especially when there is such a delightful view/*
gushed Mrs. Perkins, and swept on like a little whitecap
wave that breaks and is lost in a restless sea.

There was Mrs. Carter sailing toward him, radiant with
the diamond crescent in her reddish hair . . . No, he
did not want Mrs. Carter's glibness now ; he was tired and
content to watch Mrs. Montague bow and smile from
some obscure comer, like a page watching his queen from
afar.

To escape Mrs. Carter, he turned into the little rococo
room, a quiet retreat where the few voices sounded muf-
fled after the din of the larger rooms. A few men were
talking together in one comer round the punch bowl, a
flirtation seemed to be going on in the other. It was Har-
old, too, who was laughing in his gay, careless way, with
a dark-haired lady in a gauzy dress of deep rose, whose
back was turned toward Peter.

The lady was talking with lively gestures and an ex-
pressive way of tossing back her head, so that Peter found
himself wondering what she might be saying to Harold.
The lady tumed round . . .

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''Virginia I'' Peter had her hand in both of his in-
stantly.

"I don't know if you like your surprise!" she said,
laughmg merrily. "It was your mother's idea — so you
can blame her !"

So it had been his own mother's idea to surprise him
with Virginia's coming, and not Mrs. Montague's at all !

Harold, as a cordial host, shook hands with Peter
in a friendly way.

"Isn't it good to see Virginia again?" he said, once more
the old comrade, but turned immediately to greet a new-
comer and soon slipped out of the room.

Peter sat down in Harold's place on the sofa beside
Virginia.

"I can't believe that you're real I" he assured her. **How
long is it since I've seen you last?"

"Oh — ^two years ago — ^last summer," she answered in
her melodious voice. "But then only such a little while.
It is really very long ago that I stayed at home all the year
round — ^I was sixteen years old then, and you were away
at Art School in the winter. Oh, we are strangers,
Peter."

Although Virginia was by far the most striking lady
in the room — in fact, the whole room, with its flushed and
restless inmates seemed but a natural background for her
beauty — ^yet it seemed to Peter that they ought to be talk-
ing at home by an intimate fireside, perhaps in Miss
Oarissa's quaint old sitting-room with its scent of
lavender.

"You haven't changed much since that time in Miss
Clarissa's garden," he said warmly, "and not a bit since
I saw you last. But you're going to stay at home forever.

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aren't you? And are you staying with Mrs. Montague
now? — I hope for a long, long time."

"Oh, for a fortnight or so," she answered. "You see,
we didn't come back till after Christmas, and Mrs. Mon-
tague told Mamma I ought to have a taste of real life
before the season was over. She thinks I've been burying
my youth in the watering-places abroad, and she says our
good GuUport has no real life at all. I was glad to
come home, though, I assure you, and I hope we'll stay
for a year at least. Mamma is pretty well now. I'm tired
of being uprooted, you know."

"So am I," said Peter. "I mean, I'm tired of your being
uprooted. And you never came to Paris, after all !"

"No," said Virginia, wistfully. "I should like to have
gone. We could have had fun in Paris, I think — ^but no,
perhaps not, after all. You were probably leading a gay
artist's life, and a visitation from two New England
prigs would have been too dull."

Peter laughed.

"I am ten times gayer here than I ever was in Paris,"^
he declared. "I slaved in Paris."

"And now you're an independent artist," she ex-
claimed, pretending to be impressed. "How grand !"

Peter shrugged his shoulder^.

"And have you kept up your singing?" he asked. "How
I should love to hear you again !"

Virginia nodded.

"Yes," she said confidentially, "I've been working quite
hard. I found a good teacher in Nice — ^an Italian — and
he told me" — she looked up at Peter with glowing dark
eyes — ^"he told me I was his most promising pupil."

"You must sing tonight !'* cried Peter.

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Virginia made a forbidding gesture.

"Oh, I should die of fright with all these people
around," she protested. "You see, I haven't had much
training — z, few lessons here — a few lessons there — ^that
doesn't amount to much . . . But some day, if you'll
come to see me here alone, then I'll sing to you !"

"Tomorrow !" cried Peter.

"Then you must take me to your studio and show me
your paintings!" laughed Virginia.

Again Peter shrugged his shoulders.

"I'm sorry," said Peter honestly, "I have almost noth-
ing to show in my studio. My pictures are all at the
houses of various elderly ladies — and besides, they aren't
much to look at."

"I like the one of Mrs. Montague," said Virginia, "it's
a brilliant study in blue and green."

"Well, I think that is the best— even though it's the
first one," Peter had to admit.

"You know — " said Virginia quickly, and then hesi-
tated.

"Oh, what?" asked Peter eagerly.

"You said a little while ago," she began again, "that I
had not changed a bit. Now, I can't say the same of you.
You seem so — so diflFerent !"

"How different ?" asked Peter, perceiving tW the dif-
ference was not in his favor.

"Oh," said Virginia r^uctantly, "you seem so grown-
up — so mundane — so like anybody . . . Forgive
me!" she cried, suddenly, while her pale face turned
crimson, "perhaps I ought not to have said that !"

But Peter laughed gaily.

"Why not?" he asked. "I don't mind that at all— an

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artist nowadays, fortunately, no longer has to be diflFer-
ent from other people — he isn't expected to be a quaint,
queer fellow."

"Oh r sighed Virginia, shaking her head. "It isn't the
artist — ^the true artist — who ever seems queer to me; he
seems the only sane and sensible being to me, and it's
the other people who are queer and a little wrong."

Peter gazed at the wistful play about her lips and the
inspired luster in her eyes, and he was silent.

All at once Virginia broke out into gay laughter, and
Peter recovered from his astonishment only as he^nihem-
bered her old way of leaping from seriousness to mirth.

"I have been much too serious," she said. "I know it
isn't at all comme il faut to be serious at parties. Come,
let's be correct now and jabber all the silly nonsense we
can think of."

She rose airily and led him through the crowded rooms,
laughing merrily and making mischievous remarks about
the people they saw round them. Peter did not stir from
her side all the evening, for, as Virginia was a stranger
in Boston, and Harold kept away discreetly, he could be
her cavalier undisturbed. And he was proud to be seen
as her cavalier, for hejcnew that she was the loveliest and
the youngest lady in the house.

In his joy Peter forgot that he had not said a word to
Mrs. Montague since his first greeting. He and Virginia
stood eating ices by the great fireplace, watching the
blaze and talking cheerfully about Dick and Elsie Robins
at home, when Peter felt the light touch of a fan on his
arm and, turning round, saw his hostess herself standing
beside him, dazzling and majestic in her velvet gown
and her brilliants.

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"How did you like my surprise?" she asked.

"The best surprise I could dream of !" answered Peter.

Then he blushed suddenly, as he remembered his fer-
vent hand-kiss of only two nights ago.

Mrs. Montague's green eyes, however, remained cool,
and she did not seem to notice his embarrassment.

"Mr. Giroux is going to play the flute now, with Miss
Estell at the harp," said Mrs. Montague, "and when they
have finished, Virginia, I do hope you will change your
mind."

"Are you going to sing?" Peter fairly shouted at Vir-
ginia. "Is she going to—" But when he turned round
to address Mrs. Montague, she had vanished.

"Please, please sing!" begged Peter, but Virginia so-
berly shook her head.

The greater part of the guests now passed into the big
music room to take seats, and the din of artificially ex-
cited voices subsided into a murmur. Peter and Virginia
settled themselves on a sofa in a corner, and while the
quaint, melancholy strains of the flute and the delicate
ripples of the harp quivered toward them, it seemed to
Peter that the music was reflected as in a mirror in Vir-
ginia's dark eyes.

"You are not enjoying this as much as I am," said Vir-
ginia, after the first movement.

"Yes, I am," said Peter. "I am enjoying your joy!"

Then the plaintive flute set in again with a pastoral air
that seemed to challenge the listeners in the room to throw
off their tinsel and gambol in the fields.

When the duet was finished and the guests were still
eagerly applauding, Mrs. Montague glided secretly up to
Virginia and whispered :

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"How are you feeling about it now?"

"Oh, I can't, after this!" declared Virginia. "How
could I r

"Oh, yes, you'll sing all the better," pleaded Peter.

Virginia hesitated a minute.

"Perhaps, when they've begun to go home," she said at
last, "when only a few are left."

"Hurrah!" cried Peter, "I'll chase them away."

Then he looked, somewhat alarmed, up at his hostess
whose august presence he had forgotten for the moment,
but Mrs. Montague smiled down at him with irony on her
lips.

"That's a noble resolution," she said to Virginia. "I'm
glad. I'll speak .to Mr. Dagger, and you can sing the
songs you practiced with him last night."

"Oh, Peter !" cried Virginia, when Mrs. Montague had
left them, "these people are very blase, aren't they?
They're not a friendly audience, I'm afraid !"

They stayed in their retreat quietly, Virginia rather
tremulous, and Peter fanning her eagerly, as if he were
trying to fan away her stage fright, while the company
was gradually thinning out. Then came Mr. Dagger, a
short, jovial, middle-aged man, with an armful of music
books, and he and Virginia after much discussion decided
what songs should be sung.

A diminished company now came pouring back into
the music room that had been deserted, and a murmur
was swept along, till the words reached Peter : "Miss Grey
is going to sing!"

"You'll have to, now, you know," whispered Peter de-
lightedly.

Virginia rose, pale, with trembling arms, and Mr. Dag-

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ger followed her to the grand piano at the opposite end
of the room, like a grotesque poodle.

"Who's Miss Grey?" Peter heard some one ask behind
him, as he was looking for a seat nearer the piano.

"A niece of Mrs. Montague's," a voice replied, "who
was brought up in France."

"No," said another voice, "I think she is just a summer
acquaintance from Green Shore."

Peter found a seat at the side from which he could ob-
serve Virginia well without being seen by her.

As she leaned over the piano to give Mr. Dagger direc-
tions, she seemed to have thrown oflF her tremulous stage
fright and emerged laughing and at ease.

Now the room was hushed. Then rose a silver, bell-
like, fairy voice — ^Virginia's voice ? It was hard to believe
that he had been laughing, bantering this very night with
the creature that had held locked up such a voice as this,
now set free.

Songs of Schumann that Peter had heard before — ^'The
Lotus Flower," "The First Violet" — ^and then delicate
gauzy French songs — "Debussy," someone whispered —
and then a song in Italian that Peter could not under-
stand, a sunny, jubilant lay that echoed in Peter's heart.
The strangeness of the words enhanced the beauty of the
tones; the rhythm, the melody seemed to lift him and
bear him away

A scent of garden flowers enveloped him — summer,
sunlight, earliest youth. Virginia was holding gilly-flow-
ers in her hand in Miss Qarissa's garden . . . And
now a burst of radiance : red poppies, fiery, glorious and a
flood of sunlight on a child's golden hair. Red poppies —
red poppies ! Oh, the song must never end, or the vision

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would fade! He wanted to catch the vision with his
hands like a fleeting butterfly — ^he wanted to hold back the
song that was flowing, flowing on . . .

The song was ended ; then brutal applause chased the
vision quite away. But Peter was like one stunned.
Where had that vision been slumbering these last months,
like the enchanted Princess asleep till wakened by the
Prince's healing kiss? How could the vision but fade
here among pale, jaded people who had all heard the
song, but no doubt seen nothing!

"Oh, if you knew what your singing made me see!" he
exclaimed to Virginia, seizing her hand. She looked at
him in open-eyed astonishment, but before she could
speak, Harold had come up behind them.

"That was stunning!" he cried, and Peter turned away.

He was moving in a trance, and though the vision had
faded with the song, like one who has stepped out of a
surf bath aglow from the tingle of the salt and the shock
of the waves, he was still throbbing from its force. He
looked for his hostess and bade her an indifferent good-
by> forgetting even to thank her for the surprise that she
had helped to plan, and then went back to Virginia, who
was still talking with Harold.

"Good-by. Thank you !" he said inanely, shook hands
with Virginia, then with Harold, and hurried away out
of the swarming, buzzing house.

The vision — ^how pale it had grown in these last months,
so pale, indeed, that his inward eye had lost sight of it
altogether ! But, after all, how could the red poppies keep
their summer glow in this hothouse of bland discourse and
art that pleased and flattered? Back in his studio, Peter
lit the single candle again and sat upright on his divan to

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brood into the night. Had he lost his youth in these two
winters? Virgina had come to call him back. Had he
been living under a spell since the days of rapturous por-
trait painting at Mira Mare — 2l spell cast by Harold's
mother, the abhorrence of his childhood ? But where was
the rapture in painting Mrs. Perkins and Mrs. Carter and
Mrs. Jeremiah Jones ? He remembered how he had over-
heard Mrs. Perkins say to her neighbor at a concert
when he sat behind her : "I've had such a busy day — ^first
I had a shampoo, then I sat for my portrait, then I had
to rush to luncheon, and then to a bridge party!"

Virginia had called him "different": diflFerent indeed!
Peter lit a cigarette and smoked, for he knew that he
could not sleep. The spectral candle glow lit up a sketch
on the wall — 2l summer sketch that he had made with the
Woodfins, of the beach in the early morning. The sea,
the rocks, the woods were fit models for a young man's
brush. Nature the only woman whose face was forever
young and never jaded. Landscape painting, Peter knew
too well, was his real vocation, and he did not have a
single landscape in his studio beyond the rough sketches
from the summer. The Art Club would have a landscape
exhibition in February — ^the first of next month would be
the last day for sending in a picture — and Peter had no
picture to send. Now fortunately. Miss Angel's portrait
would not begin for a week or more. Why not make a
painting from the various sketches on the wall — a picture
of the rocks and surf in a storm ? Yes ; he would do that,
he would tell the little Italian model that he need not pose
for him at all, he would forget portrait painting for a
week and bring the breath of the sea and the murmur
of the surf into his dusty studio.

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With this resolution made, Peter went to sleep and
did not wake up till late in the morning. The sun shone
cheerfully in at the big studio window and Peter was in a
working mood. He would toil hard till dark and then
call on Virginia at five, as a reward. This should be the
best landscape he had ever painted, the work of many
summers blended into a final chord ; he would startle the
Art Club and win a name among his colleagues — ^not
only in the world of artistic fashion !

At the end of a tense day's work, he went to call on
Virginia, eager to tell her about it ; but she was gone out
Thus checked in his impulse to confide, Peter decided not
to let Virginia know about his new work at all, but to
surprise her by announcing when the time came that he
had a landscape accepted by the Art Club.

The next day Peter found a note from Mrs. Montague,
asking him to dinner Thursday night "in the family,"
so that she might see him at leisure. Until Thursday
night Peter worked hard : the beach and the rocks grew
under his hands and the surf was rising . . . How he
would have liked to tell Virginia about his secret and
absorbing task !

As he stepped into the crimson reception room with the
Corots and Daubignys, he saw Mrs. Montague alone,
standing in front of the window-seat against the crimson
curtain, reading a letter. There was never a more
queenly apparition than this woman in her black gown
against the crimson curtain, never a more enigmatic, bit-
ter smile than that which played about her spare, haughty
lips, as she read her letter. If he could paint her now in
this moment, this one rare moment of her perfect outer
repose and inner unrest! What was youth, what were

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rocks and waves beside this complexity, this mysterious
bitterness revealed for a moment against a crimson cur-
tain! Had he rebelled against the spell cast by such
majesty? The more fool he !

"Oh, Mr. Loring!'* Mrs. Montague folded up her let-
ter quickly, and a mundane smile transformed her face.
"Virginia is just showing Mr. Atherton your portrait."

"Mr. Atherton is here !" cried Peter. "You have sur-
prises in store for me. I haven't seen him for a year !"

"He is a difficult guest to capture during the college
year," said Mrs. Montague. "It takes a new picture or a
rare first edition to entice him here."

Then Virginia came into the room with sprightly steps.

"Mr. Atherton likes your picture," she cried, laughing
with radiant eyes.

"I do," said Maurice Atherton who followed Virginia
and shook hands with Peter. "Paris has done something
for you! And I hear that you are leading a happy life
here, a constant *dream of fair women.' "

"No," said Peter, looking at Mrs. Montague, "only one
so far."

Then he felt Virginia's astonished glance almost burn-
ing into his face, and he remembered that Virginia did
not know him as a courtier.

"Shall we wait for Harold?" asked Mrs. Montague,
and in that moment Harold strolled into the room with
fluent apologies. Atherton smiled on Harold and all his
masterful blase airs, as if he were still a boy of ten.

"And how do you like the law?" he asked.

"Harold is more interested in breaking the law than in
studying it," said Mrs. Montague, "by speeding, by danc-
ing later than the city allows ^"

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"I think mother wants the reputation of a wicked son,"
said Harold. "She always makes me out worse than I
am.

There was an undertone of rebellion whenever Har-
old bantered with his mother that did not escape Peter.
And during the intimate dinner Harold was rather silent,
partly, no doubt, because his mother and Atherton talked
about her collection of engravings, a topic for which he
had no patience, while Virginia fixed eyes of awe on the
gay philosopher.

"He's the most wonderful man I know," she whispered
to Peter at her side. "He seems to be smiling at every-
thing so calmly, although he doesn't make fun of anything
the way everyday people do. Yet — *^ she added, "I am
just the least bit afraid of him."

"My mother is, too," whispered Peter. "She says he
makes one feel silly. Perhaps it is because he can see
through the hidden motives people have for saying what
they say and for doing "

Peter stopped short, for Maurice Atherton was turn-
ing round.

"Mrs. Montague tells me," he said with his faint,
ironic smile, "that you have more orders than you can
fill."

"Why, Mr. Loring has jumped into popularity," said
Mrs. Montague. "He simply woke up one day and found
himself popular."

Peter flushed with pleasure. He thought it very grace-
ful of his hostess not to indicate that it was she who
not only had discovered him, but had made him known
and brought him his reputation; he was thrilled by her
pride in him ; in this moment he thought her more beauti-

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f ul and queenly than ever, and he felt like making a vow
of everlasting homage.

"And do you find your colleagues worth while?" asked
Maurice Atherton.

"I know very few," Peter began reluctantly.

"You see, Mr. Atherton," his hostess continued for
him, "there are few painters here who are Mr. Loring's
style. Most of them have no general culture, and many of
them are scarcely fit to be seen in a drawing-room — ^like
that clumsy boor in Gullport — ^that sullen painter of
marshes who lives in the woods and grunts in mono-
syllables when a lady speaks to him — Mr. Woodcock, or
something of that sort."

Peter knew that he ought to defend his old teacher, but
in that moment he did not have the heart to contradict a
word uttered by the hostess whom he adored.

In the instant hush that followed, Peter turned toward
Virginia, prompted, no doubt, by his sudden sense of guilt,
and then he met Virginia's glance — ^a glance so shocked,
so wounded, so reproachful, that he turned away again,
with remorse biting at his heart.

"When I was in Florence," Atherton began, and soon
engaged Mrs. Montague in a tete-a-tete discourse, so that
Peter was left alone with his bad conscience. For Vir-
ginia had turned immediately to Harold, and was talking
with him eagerly in a voice so low that Peter could not
understand her words ; her eyes were sparkling for Har-
old's benefit, she was laughing gaily, she had plunged into
a brisk flirtation. This was to punish him — she had found
him altogether too "diflFerent" from the Peter of her
childhood !

With a dull sense of pain, Peter joined in the conversa-

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tion of Atherton and Mrs. Montague, though he cast dis-
tracted glances at Virginia, until they all rose and saun-
tered into the little rococo room where he had seen Vir-
ginia first the other night. She now sat with Harold on
the yellow brocade sofa at the end of the room farthest
from Peter, sipping her coffee leisurely and laughing up
at Harold as if she were quite happy at his side.

After coffee, Mrs. Montague took out her collection of
first prints and showed it to Peter and Atherton who was
a connoisseur. If there had been no Virginia flirting with
Harold at the end of the room, Peter would have been
more than content to look at rare engravings in exquisite
intimacy with Maurice Atherton and Mrs. Montague,
who opened her portfolio only for chosen spirits. But, as
it was, he felt an outcast from the realm where he be-
longed. There was youth, laughing and bantering on the
yellow brocade sofa, while he was keeping sober step
with his mother's generation ! Had he really been mov-
ing under the benumbing spell of Mrs. Montague that had
thus perverted his senses ? Why could he not break loose
from the necromancy that was bleaching the glow of his
youth ?

"What do you think, Mr. Loring?" — Oh, Mrs. Mon-
tague was asking his opinion about something, no doubt
about the print in front of his eyes which were not look-
ing. He must look now, and answer, and be polite and
go on playing the courtier.

Meanwhile he was thinking in the background of his
mind that Harold was a dangerous rival, that Mrs. Per-
kins had gossiped about a violent flirtation between Har-
old and an English girl last summer, to whom she had
supposed that he was secretly engaged, but that this rumor

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was by no means authentic. Peter could not think of
marrying: though many a poor artist envied him for his
prosperity, he would not yet dare to shelter a flower like
Virginia. But, at the same time, he could not bear the
thought that Harold might easily snatch her from his
reach.

"You are silent, Mr. Loring," said Mrs. Montague.

"I'm only admiring," Peter replied, and was glad when
the portfolio with the prints was closed.

Deliberately he crossed the room to Virginia and said :

"Won't you please sing, Virginia — ^that song — ^that Ital-
ian song— do !"

But Virginia looked up at him wistfully and shook her
head.

"No, I have sung for you once," she said, with a sad
smile, "and that was enough.''

Rebellion broke out in Peter's heart. He shrugged his
shoulders, turned his back on Virginia and joined his
hostess again.

Mr. Atherton was bending over a large book of illus-
trations on a table, and Mrs. Montague was looking out
of the window, for a moment listless and forgetful of
her guests. The gardenia at her waist had slipped from
her sash and was gliding to the floor. Peter stooped to
pick it up. A momentary beam of light kindled in Mrs.
Montague's cold, green eyes as she turned her glance
quickly away from the window to Peter, and when he
gave her back the flower, her cool hand rested on his, as
if a swift bird had passed in its flight and laid its wings
lightly on his hand.

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CHAPTER VIII

ASHES

A KNOCK at the studio door ! Peter left his easel
where stood the portrait of young Miss Reynolds,
to which he was adding the last touches, and sauntered to
the door.

"Mr. Athertonl" cried Peter. "So you have really
come !"

"I said I would swoop down on you unannounced,
when you would least expect me," said Maurice Ather-
ton. "Now, let me see . . /'

Peter felt as if his dull studio were suddenly illumined
by the newcomer's pervading and unfailing cheerfulness,
a placid cheerfulness that seemed never to be caused by
any special joy. It happened that Peter had three por-
traits in his studio to finish, and one on which he was to
cover the left ear with more hair.

"Only portraits," he said to his visitor. "I wish I had
something to show — ^something with an idea in it — — "

"Oh, I dare say your models have few ideas in their
heads," said Atherton. , "But that doesn't hinder you from
having ideas about them."

Maurice Atherton stood in silent contemplation of bland
Miss Reynolds with her meek glance, Mrs. Piatt with her
square face and the diamond earrings more brilliant than

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her eyes. Miss Angell with the bobbing curls, and Mrs.
Carter, whose big left ear was to be curtained by more
red-brown hair.

There was not a sign on Maurice Atherton's calm face
that Peter could read, and he was growing nervous with
suspense.

"They are nice," said the philosopher at last, with a
lingering emphasis on the last word, as he turned his large
luminous eyes on Peter. "But there is a lack, a lack of
something that you promised to have when I saw your
sketches last"

Peter felt a pang.

"I know," he said, humbly. "But that was when I was
studying. You see, now I get no criticism whatever,
only . . /*

"Only praise,*' Atherton finished, with his placid, half-
ironic smile.

"Yes," said Peter, and looked out of the window over
the gray city to avoid his companion's intuitive glance.

"Too many women !" said Maurice Atherton with the
dispassionate voice of an oracle.

"You are right," said Peter.

If Jack Woodfin, if any of his colleagues should have
criticized him thus, Peter would have resisted, he would
have remembered that he was the most fashionable young
portrait painter in Boston : but what was that in Maurice
Atherton's brilliant eyes?

"I always give one piece of advice to young artists,"
the philosopher continued, seating himself leisurely on the
divan by the window. "I say to them: don't marry!
Keep your eyes clear from the gray mist that rises
through cares and petty considerations "

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"But I'm not married !'* protested Peter.

"Your case is worse," Atherton replied. "You must
be kind to Mrs. X because her husband has just made a
gift to the Studio Club ; you must not paint Mrs. Y's nose
too red, because she has just invited you to her musical
night ; you must not make Miss Z too stout, because she
has a weakness for a French painter whom she met on the
steamer "

"You are right !'* laughed Peter, in spite of his humil-
iating grief. "Far too right. But what would you
have me do ? I can't run away now— just when I'm in de-
mand — I can't wilfully turn out of my one path to suc-
cess — " Peter felt that his tone was growing theatrical, so
he shrugged his shoulders and said tersely : "What shall
I do?"

"Oh, keep your fashionable orders, by all means,"
Atherton replied, "only in filling them — ^paint away, as if
your models were only chance objects for your spirit to
reflect with its own light, as if your models were your
slaves "

"Oh, dear," sighed Peter, "I think I've been the slave
of my models !"

"Above all," his visitor went on, "never paint to please,
never paint to match the wallpaper in a drawing-room;
never — Oh, whatever you do, never forget that the artist
is above the world of affairs and fashions and has a right
to smile down."

Peter sat penitent, like a schoolboy. He was longing to
tell Atherton about the picture of the rocks in storm
that he had been painting at the studio of his own
free will; but he checked this impulse, because, after
all, it would be better to wait a few days, until he

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could boast that the picture would hang at the Art Qub
exhibition.

"In the summer," was all that he said, "I'm going to do
my landscapes again. That's where I really belong."

"Your portrait of Mrs. Montague seems to me more
inspired than any of these," said Mr. Atherton, with a
sweeping gesture at the four portraits in the studio. "Per-
haps the sea in the background helped you there."

Peter did not dare to say that Mrs. Montague had been
a more inspiring model than the other ladies.

"Mrs. Montague thought the picture of Mrs. Carter —
the one with the red-brown hair — one of my best," Peter
said lamely.

"Mrs. Montague," Atherton responded, "is an art lover,
no doubt ; but you must remember that the arts are for her
only luxurious pastimes in her leisure : as she wants rare
and well-toned rugs under her slipper, so she wants the
finest music to beguile her evenings, and agreeable paint-
ings to rest her jaded eyes when she lets them wander
over her walls in passing through her rooms — especially
a painting that flatters her more than her mirror !"

He dared to speak in such a tone of her ! If anyone
but Atherton had spoken thus, Peter's chivalry would,
have been roused; as the adoring page that he was, he
would have championed his queen. But Maurice Ather-
ton, who had been her coveted guest at Mira Mare when
Peter had played on the beach, a little boy ; Atherton,
whose brilliant eyes could penetrate beneath fair skins—
Atherton, no doubt, was right! In this moment Peter
repented that he had neglected his old companions of the
Art School and had not tried to know any of hfs good
colleagues.

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"It harms one's art to be a fashionable painter, I sup-
pose," Peter tried to say flippantly, but his own words
sounded flat.

Atherton had risen to go.

"Thank you for opening my eyes," said Peter, at the
door.

"That's what a philosopher is for," said Maurice Ath-
erton and added with his placid smile : "I hope you don't
mind my free speech."

Alone in his studio, Peter looked at his four portraits
with stem eyes : they all looked like sisters, Mrs. Piatt and
Miss Reynolds and Mrs. Carter and Miss Angell, though
they were all different types and their ages varied from
nineteen to sixty, but there was the same vapidity, the
some unspirited smoothness about them all. Atherton
was right. In Atherton's eyes Peter must redeem his art,
and first of all by showing his "Rocks in Storm" at the
Art Qub.

With this final note of joy in hope ringing in his mind,
Peter lived through a dull dinner party at Mrs. Carter's
that very night, moving and conversing as in a trance,
and in the same way through the remainder of the week,
with its routine of day's work and night's amusement.
The reply from the Art Club was long in coming, but all
the more exhilarating was this game of anticipation.

At last the morning came when the letter from the Art
Qub was thrown in at his door. Welcome, welcome piece
of mail! Peter tore open the envelope. . . . Rejected!
This was a possibility he had not dreamed of, this was
too much ! He dropped onto the divan and sat with his
hands clasped, brooding and staring at the cracked and
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his native landscape was his true vocation, he had been
so proud of this one free, unprescribed work of the win-
ter, and now . . .

For a whole half hour Peter sat without stirring, with
his mind a dreary void. Then his eye fell on another let-
ter that he had not even picked up from the floor, a little
square mauve envelope, such as he received often in these
days. Languidly Peter tore it open and read a letter from
Mrs. Gay, whose portrait had been one of his first orders
in the autumn, asking him to paint her little girl Daisy
with her poodle.

Peter tossed the little lavender note on the floor, then
broke out into a long and bitter laugh : what irony that
these two letters should have come in one mail ! Well, if
his colleagues repulsed him, if the work that was most
truly his own was not wanted, he would go where he was
sought and paint little girls named Daisy with poodles on
their laps! Was he not himself turning into a lapdog,
licking the hands of patronesses?

It happened fortunately that Peter had no appoint-
ment today, and so, loathing the sight of his studio, he
went outdoors and tramped in the snow down Beacon
Hill and along the frozen river against the wind that made
the snowflakes dance and the trees sway their boughs.
But when he came back to his studio, the bitterness was
still in his heart. He dabbled at a still life — 2l foolish
combination of a jug and a few lemons and a statuette —
because he could not let a day go by without touching a
paint-brush, and welcomed the early dusk as a summons
to stop work. What should he do the long, dreary even-
ing alone in the cold studio with his silent rage? He went
out to get an evening paper and then studied Boston's

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program of pleasure. He would go to the theater to dis-
tract himself — ^to some wild, absurd melodrama. "The
Coming of William" seemed to fit his purpose ; so, at eight
o'clock, he found himself in the crowded theater in an
orchestra seat pretty far back and at the side. He had
barely arrived when the lights went out and the curtain
rose on the old Kentucky home of William.

Though there were many spirited activities on the
stage, even a pistol shot or two, yet Peter's thoughts were
roaming far away, wondering who the favored among
his colleagues might be whose works had been accepted by
the Art Club, wondering if he should ever have a land-
scape exhibited, wondering what he would have done if
he had never met Mrs. Montague. No doubt, he would
not be sitting here . . .

Was not that she herself, Mrs. Montague, in the box
across the house, inclining toward her neighbor with that
infallible grace of hers? For the first act was over and
the lights had been turned on. A lady whose face was
hidden by a fan was talking with Mrs. Montague : could
it be Virginia? The fan was whisked aside, Virginia
looked straight across the house, her eye caught his, and
instantly turned away. There was no bowing, perhaps
because they were too far apart, perhaps — ^no, surely —
because Virginia did not want Peter to know that she had
seen him. Now she was playing with her fan and laugh-
ing gaily at the young man beside her, now she was toss-
ing back her head and turning round to talk with Harold
behind her, now her wine-colored scarf was slipping to
the floor and her partner was stooping to pick it up,
whereupon she smiled graciously.

There she was, laughing and flirting with Harold and

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her other cavalier, while Peter was looking on in his lonely
seat at the side. Did she do it all to torture him, because
she knew that he was watching, or was she in her element,
regardless of him, with these others? Was this really the
Virginia of Miss Qarissa's garden? If she could guess
the disappointment, the weariness of heart that had sent
him here, would she be laughing at Harold's jokes with
such abandon?

During the next act, Peter's eyes kept turning to the box
at the left, though he could not see its occupants, and he
scarcely heeded the play as he waited in suspense for the
curtain to fall and the performance that absorbed his at-
tention to begin in the box. When the lights were turned
on again, there was the same gaiety on Virginia's lips,
the same frolicsome flutter of her fan, the same care-free
toss of her head. Peter wondered why he was not going
home, because the play did not hold his interest, and Vir-
ginia's sprightliness and Harold's suave, lazy smile an-
noyed him.

But all at once Mrs. Montague looked with her pene-
trating glance in his direction, raised her lorgnette,
dropped it again and bowed to him with a brilliant smile.
The smile vibrated through him like a current : what did
the coquetries of a wayward damsel matter, when he re-
ceived such a bow from a proud, august lady whom others
approached with shyness ! Let Virginia flirt with whom
she liked — he had the favor of a queen ! With this ex-
ultation, Peter stayed till the end, coolly watched Har-
old help Virginia into her red velvet coat and then walked
to his dreary home.

After a night of wild dreams, Peter woke up for his
daily toil. Miss Norma Angell, a little old lady, was com-

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ing to his studio at half-past nine with her crocheting for
"local color," as she had explained.

"And in the afternoon I had better go and play nurse-
maid," Peter said to himself, as he remembered the letter
from Mrs. Gay.

Little Daisy Gay, for whose portrait Peter had to make
plans with her mother, proved to be a spoilt child who
had to be coaxed into each trial position, and the poodle
was still more rebellious. As the child went to school,
Peter was to paint her only on Saturday mornings, begin-
ning the very next day.

What a Saturday morning! Although Daisy's nurse
sat in the nursery where the portrait was being painted
and told her stories, the child would whine every ten min-
utes:

"I'm tired ; I want to go and play !"

Then she would jump down from her chair unbidden,
and the poodle after her, and Peter and the nurse would
have to use all their strategy to make the poodle pose
again.

"Oh, how ugly you made me !" cried the child, when the
canvas was barely covered with paint. "I don't look like
that ! You must make me pretty. And don't forget my
curls — and Fip's curls, too !"

Peter wondered what his father would say if he could
look in and see his son at work on Saturday mornings.
Perhaps, if Peter had been in a sunny mood, he would
have made friends with the child and thought of his own
childhood and the days when Virginia had long, golden
curls. But the sunshine had fled from his spirit and left
only a pale, depressing haze. When this fog would lift,
Peter could not tell, nor whether it would ever lift at all.

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A few days after the night at the theater, Peter was
summoned to Mrs. Montague's.

When he found himself opposite his patroness, by the
blazing open fire in the room with the crimson wallpaper,
where she was bending over her teacups like some infalli-
ble empress dowager performing a significant rite, the
old magic began to work again. It was easy enough to let
Atherton chide you for submitting to the sway of such an
empress when you were out of her sight, but when she
was passing you your teacup and talking about Zuluologa
and looking at you with green sea eyes, then it was that
you lapsed into voluntary servitude. Peter was trying to
guess, during the sprightly discourse, why he had been
called today, but his eloquent hostess vouchsafed him
no hint. Suddenly — Peter scarcely knew how they had
led up to this point — ^Mrs. Montague was telling him
that Virginia had consented to prolong her visit for sev-
eral weeks, but that she had to be back at home for her
parents' silver, wedding in March.

"And you know — now that I'm coming to the point !"
said Mrs. Montague, "I have been trying hard to think
of an original gift for Mrs. Grey, and nothing has oc-
curred to me that could compare with a portrait of Vir-
ginia from your hands."

Peter knew that he was turning pale ; he knew that Tie
was longing to paint Virginia, now that the idea had been
suggested, but he knew, too, that he was hostile to the
thought.

"I shall be very glad to paint her," said his lips, inanely.

In that moment Virginia came airily into the room,
wrapped in furs, with a rose fastened on the muff, and an
out-of-door glow on her usually pallid cheek.

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"Has he consented?" she asked Mrs. Montague with
laughing eyes, when she had shaken hands with Peter
briskly.

Mrs. Montague nodded.

"You know," said Virginia, still addressing her hostess,
"I had an idea in the middle of the night."

She tossed off her fur scarf and sat down by the tea
table.

"IVe been thinking," she went on, "that mother would
like to have my picture as a kind of remembrance of my
visit to you, the first year that we came back to settle at
home. That would give it a kind of symbolic value, you
see "

"Fmsure Mr. Loring doesn't mind painting a picture
with a symbolic value," said Mrs. Montague, "or did you
want an allegorical device painted in the backgroimd ?"

"My coat of arms?" responded Virginia. "No, some-
thing much better — ^now, please don't protest. I've set
my heart on it. I think it would be so appropriate, so
sjrmbolic, if you would be in the picture, too."

"Oh, my child!" exclaimed Mrs. Montague, "your
mother doesn't want to see an old woman when she looks
at the portrait of her daughter — a sort of dragon watch-
ing over you."

"No," Virginia pleaded. "You're a friend of mother's,
you see. She would always be reminded of the good times
I had with you, and that would make her happy."

Peter was quite convinced that her real reason for
wanting Mrs. Montague in the picture was her aversion
to posing for him alone. She had been talking to Mrs.
Montague as if Peter had been miles away, and he was
growing tired of the slight.

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"I think Virginia is afraid of posing for me/' he said
bluntly, whereupon Virginia turned pale and threw him a
swift, angry glance.

"I shall go with you to the studio, an)rway,'' said Mrs.
Montague. "It will amuse me to watch."

"The studio?" exclaimed Virginia, in frank astonish-
ment. "I supposed he would paint us here, just as he
painted you on the veranda of Mira Mare."

"The light isn't good enough anywhere," explained Mrs.
Montague, "and, besides, you wouldn't be as undisturbed
here as in Green Shore."

"You don't want paint on these rugs, do you?" said
Peter, a little gruffly, for he was piqued at being referred
to as "he."

Virginia made no reply, and after more persuasion on
Mrs. Montague's part, she consented to have a portrait
painted of herself alone. Peter was to begin next week,
and then work strenuously every morning, except on the
Saturdays reserved for little Daisy and her dog.

'What shall I wear?" asked Virginia, resigned.

"That wine-colored scarf," said Peter, whereupon Vir-
ginia blushed, remembering, no doubt, her skirmishes at
the theater on the only night when Peter could have seen
that scarf.

"The world is all colors for Mr. Loring," said Mrs.
Montague.

"Then he will have a sad time with such a colorless
subject," said Virginia. "But I'll wear the scarf, if you
like, else my portrait might be called *The Gray Miss
Grey.'"

"And a spangled fan you must have," said Peter. "I
want to paint 'The Gay Miss Grey.' "

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Peter went home that day with resentment in his heart
against Virginia. Why was she so peevish, cold and un-
kind when he had done nothing to offend her? Why did
she seem to take pleasure in stabbing him with delicate
thrusts? Whenever he thought of her now, he saw her
laughing gaily with Harold, tossing back her head jaunt-
ily and playing with her fan, and as he thought of her
with more and more resentment, there crept into her face
a cold and heartless look, which he might never have
really seen, but which could no longer be effaced from the
picture in his mind.

Then Peter began to wonder why Mrs. Montague
wanted him to paint Virginia's portrait at all. Was it,
perhaps, because his patroness wanted an excuse for
spending her mornings at Peter's studio, and could not,
without seeming ridiculous, order another portrait of her-
self ? This thought Peter dismissed angrily as altogether
too conceited, but it kept sneaking back into his mind.

When the day came that brought Virginia actually into
his studio, and she sat facing him on a high armchair
with the bright wine-colored scarf draped over her shoul-
ders and the spangled fan in one hand, it was not Vir-
ginia's face as he saw it before him, tired and express-
ionless from the strain of posing, that prompted his hands
to quick inspired work, but the face in his memory with
its careless, provoking laugh. Mrs. Montague meanwhile
was lounging on the divan and, as Peter was working in
tense silence, talked with Virginia, but occasionally darted
a remark at Peter. How different this sitting was from
the one at Mira Mare, when he had been alone with Mrs.
Montague and the sea ! If he could have been alone with
Virginia while he was painting her, who knew but that

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they might have become good friends again! But how
could they talk simply when Mrs. Montague, who could
never guess their covenant made in Miss Clarissa's gar-
den, was looking on and idly making conversation !

Or, if he could paint Mrs. Montague over again, what
enchanting hours he might have had with her in the inti-
mate simplicity of his studio, away from the distracting
background of her city house — ^a page holding a tryst with
his queen !

Virginia alone or Mrs. Montague alone ! Peter painted
away with a disappointed sense of lost opportunity, but in
his silent anger his work progressed more swiftly than it
was wont to do during more cheerful sittings, and when
the morning was over, Peter was astonished at the amount
he had done. The next morning Mrs. Montague — ^per-
haps discouraged by Peter's silence — brought a novel to
read aloud to Virginia, and the reading continued through-
out the week. Meanwhile Peter copied his model's feat-
ures and the bright color of her scarf and the silvery glit-
ter of the spangles on her fan, but as soon as the sitting
was over, the Virginia of his inward sight, the Virginia
as he had seen her that memorable night at the theater
posed for him in the sober Virginia's stead, and the blank
eyes were infused with a reckless sparkling, the stiff
neck became agile and seemed to bend, there was moisture
on the lips that had been severe, and they began to open
with spirited laughter. But about her mouth and her fore-
head mysterious lines began to grow under his hands, lines
that spoke in sly, insinuating whispers of callous coquetry
and heartless cruelty. The first time that Virginia had
seen the transformation of her picture, she had ex-
claimed :

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"Oh, you've changed me since I posed ! That isn't the
way I sat for you !"

"That's the only way you live in my mind," Peter had
replied; whereupon Virginia had been silent and sullen
for the rest of the morning.

But Mrs. Montague had praised the portrait

"You don't need a model at all!" she had said. *The
models in your mind pose much better than live ones.
What are we here for?"

And Peter had continued to paint the picture in his mind
to Mrs. Montague's amusement and Virginia's silent rage.
When a week was over, he dismissed his unwilling model
and kept on painting the portrait quite from memory.
All day he would paint at it, as much as his other work
permitted, and at night it pursued him in his dreams. At
last came the moment when Peter knew that he would
not improve it by another stroke of his brush, and he
stepped back to look at it coolly — as if he were seeing it
for the first time. Who was this gay, sprightly creature
with the mirthless laugh? Was this the fairy friend of
his childhood? Was this the lady of the garden, the
singer of the song with strange words that dispelled the
mist in his heart with a glow of radiant light? No, this
was a gay, silly coquette! Was it fair, when one was
given a book to translate, to twist the words into a wrong
meaning? Should he blot it all out? The artist in his
heart said : "No, though it was painted in bitterness and
the outcome is unkind, it is one of the best pieces of work
you have done, and the colors are first-rate!"

So in the ardor of the moment, Peter telephoned to
Mrs. Montague to tell her that the portrait which she
had ordered was completed, and Mrs. Montague prom-

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ised to come to the studio with Virginia on that very
same day.

Peter received the two ladies with some misgivings.
Mrs. Montague whisked up her lorgnette and had scarcely
shot at the picture one long, keen glance, when she ex-
claimed :

"Oh, but that's excellent, Mr. Loring! Really^ very
piquant"

But Virginia started at her likeness and grew pale.

"What do you think of it, Virginia?" asked Mrs. Mon-
tague.

There was a painful silence; then Virginia spoke,
lamely:

"I like the scarf and the dress and the fan," she began,
slowly, and then cried out passionately : "But I hate my-
self!"

"Why, my dear!" cried Mrs. Montague, and fixed her
sharp glance through her lorgnette on Virginia instead of
her picture. "What do you mean? Of course, it only
gives you in one mood, but the picture certainly has a
great deal of piquancy and charm."

"Oh, of course," said Virginia, lapsing back into mun-
dane politeness, "and mother will be ever so pleased."

Mrs. Montague sat down on the divan and talked pleas-
antly with Peter, first about the picture, then all manner
of bright gossip. A wicked thought flitted through Peter's
brain: was the worldly woman glad that he had not
painted Virginia too lovely in her youth ? That would be
petty, indeed, and yet it might be . . .

Virginia meanwhile sat with her back to her portrait
and never said a word. Her suUenness was childish, no
doubt, but it gave Peter a pang of remorse. Was all now

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over between him and Virginia? Was the bond of Miss
Qarissa's garden broken?

When Mrs. Montague took her leave, Virginia shook
hands with him too, but silently, and on the threshold
broke out into the short reckless laugh that he had held
fast on canvas ; but her eyes were sad. She turned away,
and Peter knew that he and Virginia were friends no
more.

The presence of the picture in his studio annoyed him,
and the next morning it was packed and sent to Mrs.
Montague's. Then, when it was gone, Peter was aware of
a void during his work, and he grew homesick for the
irritating picture. The days passed in dreary routine, the
nights in melancholy brooding.

One night when a rough wind was beating against the
window-pane, and Peter was reading the paper by the fire
crackling in his studio, his eye, as it grazed the column of
•"Social Events" fell on a notice that made his pulse leap :
"Mrs. Montague is giving a farewell dance tonight for
her niece. Miss Grey, who has been spending the season
with her, and who is expecting to leave tomorrow."

So Virginia was dancing this very minute, while he sat
shivering in his lonely studio, dancing madly with Harold,
with — Oh, he did not even know who they were, all these
"young men" among whom he, though he was their age,
was never counted ! Was it from habit that he was not in-
vited to a dance with Harold's friends, or had Virginia
asked to have him slighted? She was waltzing now,
surely, with sprightly steps and her head held high — or,
perhaps, some dull, insipid fellow was fanning her with
the glittering fan that he had painted. . . .

He was not wanted where youth was merry and at play I

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IWhere did he belong? He was not sought by his col-
leagues, and his rejected landscape was mocking him like
a spectral film on the wall. He was lonely.

The flames in the fireplace had died down; only the
smouldering embers were still aglow. The room was
chilly, for gusts of wind swept in through the cracks in
the window. Peter was cold and deserted; with whom
in this great city did he belong?

As Peter stooped to pick up the paper that had slid to
the floor, he brushed against the table by the hearth,
and a sheet of note-paper fluttered in among the em-
bers. He looked down and saw that it was a letter from
Mrs. Montague. The piece of note-paper blazed up for a
moment, then nothing was left but ashes.

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CHAPTER IX

THE VISION GROWS PALE

WHAT a joy to be at home again ! The brisk salt air,
the scent of the late syringas stealing through it,
the singing of birds, the serene quiet of the shady streets
were cooling and restful to Peter's spirit after the dust
and hurry and weariness of the city in the first summer's
heat. He was strolling back from the harbor, where he
had watched the fishermen's boats from the pier like any
loafer, and his mind was empty, except for an exquisite
sense of being content with the air and the chirping of
crickets and the cool shadows on the tender green. There
was only one other live being on the drowsy street, and
that was a fantastic figure clad in purple and yellow, who
came tripping toward Peter.

"Oh, Miss Runkle, how do you do?" Peter greeted his
first teacher, whom he had not seen since last summer.

Miss Runkle's profuse hair was gray now, and her
cheerful face was a network of wrinkles, no doubt from
too many amiable smiles.

"Oh, Mr. Loring!'' she exclaimed— "Peter" had been
dropped long ago — "I am proud to know you — and what
is more, I am proud that such a popular painter was my
pupil once. I can hardly believe it."

"Oh, you flatter me," Peter protested.

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"No, indeed/' returned Miss Runkle. "From what I
have heard, it seems that the ladies have simply been
chasing after you to get their portraits painted."

"But, you see," said Peter, trying to approach her pitch
of amiability, "those ladies are not like you — ^they are no
artists, they can't tell good painting from bad painting."

"Mrs. Montague can, surely," said Miss Runkle.

"Oh, yes," said Peter. "There are exceptions, of course.
But at any rate, none of them are active artists like you.
Miss Runkle."

Miss Runkle blushed as if Peter had been the master
and she the pupil, and Peter had pity for her.

"Give my best regards to your dear mother," she said,
before passing on, "and tell her I was proud to meet her
son."

Peter laughed to himself as he walked on, thinking how
easy it was to impress the Misses Fanny Runkles of this
world. If Virginia were only so easily dazzled !

Perhaps it was a familiar light laugh that had made
Virginia flash into his mind even before he caught sight
of her as she turned into the street with Dick and Elsie
Robins and Timothy Simpkins. Like a damsel in a
Watteau picture she looked in her white dress and shady
hat with flowers, and she was laughing merrily with her
companions. Peter crossed the street and shook hands
with each in turn, and all, except Dick whom he had seen
the day before, welcomed him back in his home. Even
Virginia said that she was glad to see him again, but she
spoke in a tone of colorless, fluent cordiality, such as any-
one might have used, and in her glance there was no
warmth to make him believe that her estrangement was
over.

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"We want to have some real good times together this
summer," said Elsie Robins, in her high little voice. "Dick
has vacation now, too.'*

"Peter can take his vacation whenever he likes," said
Dick; "he is a free man,"

"Oh, I never have vacation," returned Peter. "But I
want to have some jolly, good times, too. I'm tired of
the city; it's fine to be here again."

The merry group passed on with chattering and laugh-
ter, and Peter walked home wondering whether he should
find his old merriment again.

"I just met Elsie Robins and Virginia," he said to his
mother, who was sewing by the library window.

"Oh, poor Virgmia!" exclaimed Peter's mother, and
sewed on.

"Why, poor Virginia?" Peter asked in astonishment,
for Virginia was the last in Gullport whom he should have
pitied.

"You're right! why poor Virginia?" his mother re-
sponded. "It doesn't seem as if she had any excuse to be
dissatisfied, now that her mother is so much better and
she can live at home."

"Perhaps she would rather not live at home," said
Peter. "Besides, how do you know that she isn't satis-
fied?"

"Her mother told me," was the reply. "Eleanor Grey
came here the other day and said : *How I wish I could
find a congenial companion for Virginia. Although she
seems to be having good times, she complains that she has
nothing in common with the other young people here, and
says she is lonely.' Would you believe it, Peter ? Doesn't
it seem rather ungrateful?"

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"I shouldn't say that/* answered Peter, aild walked
away wondering how one could be unhappy and yet laugh
so merrily with Timothy Simpkins.

Peter decided not to call on Virginia that night, be-
cause, after all, in spite of her bland words this morning,
they were still on frosty terms ; he would wait until to-
morrow evening.

The next night a big, full moon sent its balmy rays of
cool light onto the gardens that had been scorched by
fiery sunbeams during the long June day. The towns-
people who had hidden from the sun behind green shut-
ters now poured out of the houses to stroll in the moon-
light and the faint sea breeze. Peter walked briskly
through the meandering groups, lest he should be called
back and drawn into leisurely conversation. As he ap-
proached Virginia's house, he caught sounds of piano
playing: Virginia, no doubt, was practicing, and perhaps
she would sing to him once more. The nearer he came,
the gayer the music sounded: dance music, it was,
sprightly, swift and gay.

From the Greys' piazza sounded the rhythmic shuffling
of feet on the floor ; silhouettes of dancers were flitting
hither and thither in the moonlight, and through the open
window between the porch and the living-room Peter saw,
as in a bright picture framed by the half darkness round
about, Mrs. Grey, the beautiful lady of his childhood,
playing on the piano with deft, slender hands, while her
face in its serene, classic beauty seemed to defy the
gay caprice of her own music. Peter wondered in
this moment why he had never wanted to paint Virginia's
mother, nor even desired to paint her now : she was too
much a work of art herself, her beauty too nearly perfect

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to be enhanced on canvas. But Virginia . . . where was
she now? Dancing with one of these shadowy figures on
the piazza? A most deplorable way of being unhappy this
was, a lamentable way of being lonely !

The waltz stopped and Virginia's light and sprightly
laugh rippled through the sudden hush, ^oor, poor Vir-
ginia! Peter felt as if she had played a trick on him,
though, in truth, she was innocent enough and could not
have guessed that he had come to console her for a want
of congenial spirits. Would there be a swarm of indiffer-
ent people about her in GuUport, as in Boston, when he
wanted to see Virginia?

This was Peter's state of mind as he stood unobserved
at the fence of the Greys' yard, and in his disappointment
he turned sullenly away. As he walked back through the
streets peopled with merry idlers, he suddenly had to
laugh at himself in his role of disappointed lover slouch-
ing away from his beloved's gate in the moonlight. How
Virginia herself would laugh if she saw him ! Then he
wondered, all at once, why she had not asked him to her
party on the piazza in the first place, and whether she
had slighted him on purpose. He must find this out — ^he
must find her alone.

The next morning Peter started out on a stroll through
the town with no special aim, for he was sure of meeting
either Dick or Ted Raffles, or some other old friend en-
joying vacation, with whom he might have a set of tennis
or a sail to the island. A drowsiness was in the air
which did not invite to action, but rather to swing in a
hammock or to lie on one's back in the sand. There was
a sudden breath of syringas ; that must come from Miss
Qarissa's garden. He looked across the street and saw

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that Miss Clarissa's syringas were indeed still blooming.
He walked up to the great spreading bush at the fence and
heard a rustling and a crackling of branches.

"Oh, Virginia !" cried Peter. "You here !"

Virginia stepped out from the bushes with a profuse
armful of frail white blossoms already scorched, here and
there, by the June sun.

"You look startled," she cried, laughing in her
elfin way; "perhaps you didn't want to find me in the
bushes!"

Yesterday he had sought her and had gone away dis-
appointed; today he had not looked for her at all and
found her all alone. But she must not know what a fool-
ish swain he had been last night.

"Seven years ago," he said, abruptly, "you were picking
gilly-flowers in this garden."

"Yes," replied Virginia, in a drowsy, reminiscent tone;
"that was in August, when all the old-fashioned flowers
were out."

"Yes, all the old-fashioned flowers were out," continued
Peter, like a refrain ; "and you told me about your friend
Yvonne and how lonely you were here."

"Oh, yes, you were my confessor," she cried, laughing.
"How young and foolish I was !"

"Young and wise, you mean," said Peter, in a school-
masterly tone ; "you are young still, but I don't think that
you're so wise."

"Because I'm not confiding in you any more?" she
asked slyly.

"Yes," said Peter firmly.

"What a conceited boy you are !" cried Virginia, laugh-
ing.

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Peter did not laugh ; he was bound to make Virginia
stop her careless laughter.

"Why, isn't it the same now between us," he asked
sternly, "as seven years ago? I know my picture of
you made you angry, but I only painted it that way
in revenge. I don't see why you were so hostile to
me. • • •

"To you?" broke in Virginia, her laughter was gone
and her eyes were kindled with new fire. "Was it you?
Or was it a strange fop— a ladies' pet? . . . Why, you
know, when I came back to my home I thought : now I
am going to see Peter of the vision again ; I will see him
in a garden and will renew our bond. Well, I did see Peter
again, but not in a garden, and hardly the Peter of the
vision. . . . But I shouldn't talk so much !" she broke oflE
suddenly, with a toss of her head and a short, nervous
laugh.

Peter of the vision ! One instant it flashed before his
inward eye, the vision of blood-red poppies glowing in the
sunlight and the sun-bathed golden curls of the child in
the midst of their glory. For one instant only the vision
clutched his whole heart and made it throb — ^then it began
to grow paler and paler . , . Oh, now he understood the
secret of his failure: his vision had grown pale! Once
this year, the first night of their meeting in Mrs. Mon-
tague's house, Virginia, by her song with strange words,
had waked the vision that lay pale and slumbering in the
forgotten depth of his spirit back again to bright and
glowing life ! But she had sung to him only once, and the
vision had faded again. Peter would not confess to Vir-
ginia these contrite meditations of his heart; so he was
silent.

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The fragrance of the syringas was growing heavy, and
the air seemed weighed down by the silence.

"Perhaps you are angry now — ** Virginia b^^n slowly.

^*No/' said Peter severely; "of course not . . . But
you shall find that the Peter of the vision is not dead."

She looked up at him with a half-incredulous, half-in-
spired glance that faded in an instant, even as his vision
had lost its glow. Then she began to break oflf branches
again, as if they had been conversing in a polite and mun-
dane fashion, and because Peter understood this as a sign
for him to leave, he said good-by blandly and went his
way.

The vision, he said to himself, must lose its pallor, and
in its pristine glory stay gleaming in his heart. He was
free 'now, free from the fetters of patronesses and fash-
ion, free with the woods, the rocks and the tide! He
would turn to Nature again, his old teacher and friend,
who had been kind to him from his earliest childhood
on, who had spread out her beauty before his eyes like
a spendthrift always, though he had turned away to
dusty city streets and pale old women in tinsel-laden
houses.

Before he was aware of his route, Peter had left the
outskirts of Gullport and entered the woods and was
now aiming toward the hermitage. Mr. Woodfin was
sitting on a tree stump in front of his cottage, smoking
his pipe.

"Good morning, Mr. Woodfin !"

" 'Morning, Peter."

"Mr. Woodfin, I've come to ask," said Peter," "if
you'd mind if I went sketching with you every day?"

"Come on!" replied the man of the woods. "Why

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should I mind ! Only I thought you'd be busy painting
ladies' portraits."

"No," said Peter eagerly. "I've made up my mind,
I don't want to do any more portraits this summer. I
want to paint one big landscape, so that I'll have some-
thing to show at the end of the summer. I don't know
yet what subject — so I want to make a g^eat many
sketches before I decide."

Peter did not know of this resolution until the
moment when he told Mr. Woodfin; it must have
formed in his mind mysteriously while he was walking
through the woods.

"That's fine !" said Mr, Woodfin. "We can start out
tomorrow ; I'm going to Parker's Landing to do some
of the dories there at low tide. Will that suit you ?"

"First-rate," said Peter. "Perhaps we can get one of
the loafers there to pose for us in a boat with a net."

"Perhaps . . . I'm not so keen on figures though,
in my sketches. Anyway, come with me whenever you
like ; you're welcome."

Peter could not wait for the dawning of the next day,
so eager was he to begin the work again that was most
truly his own in the company of his old teacher. And
indeed, when he was working in preoccupied silence with
Mr. Woodfin once more, it seemed as if the long season
in Boston had been the dream of a nap in a hammock.

Every morning Peter started out early with easel and
paint-box, often to meet Mr. Woodfin on an appointed
spot, always to chase ardently in a rough sketch some
dazzling gleam of light on the waves, some bright dis-
array of fishing boats in the harbor, some mysterious
shadow on the fields. Weeks slipped by before he had

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decided on the subject for the one g^eat picture that he
wanted to work out in detail with utmost care, but finally
he chose one sketch as his theme, a stretch of the beach
below Mira Mare at lowest tide, with reflections of
elusive tints gleaming on the wet sand as the curling
waves recede. Mr. Woodfin, who was making a study
of the g^eat rock on the very same beach, accompanied
Peter and gave him advice for the starting of the large
work on which he set his heart. As the time of low tide
changed, Peter came to the beach at different hours of
the day, and he formed his plans for each day round his
big picture as the dominating center.

One morning when the sea was a piercing blue shade
and the turquoise sky was mirrored steely blue in the
gleaming sand, Peter was distracted from his swift work
by a white figure that was coming down the stairway
in the rock to the beach.

Mrs. Montague was back again ! She had been visit-
ing in the mountains throughout June and had left
Peter undistracted in his rustic, work-a-day frame of
mind. Now she was coming toward him on the beach
with her green sun-shade, and in another moment she
would speak to him in that crisp, cymbal voice of hers
that would draw his mind away.

'Tainting the sea for variety?" the dreaded voice be-
gan. "How many handsome ladies will be jealous of
the ocean!"

Peter rose and pretended to be quite startled by her
sudden visit. Mrs. Montague gave a cold, condescend-
ing nod to Mr. Woodfin who was sketching near by,
and went on talking to Peter.

"Why didn't you start your picture on our veranda?"

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she said cordially. "You're welcome to paint there any
morning, you know. At any rate, you can leave your
canvas there, to save your dragging it back and forth
across the causeway."

"You're very kind," said Peter. "But you see, I want
to paint the reflections on the beach especially; so I
have to be down here on the sand. As for leaving the
canvas with you — ^you're really too good, but I make
changes at home : so I have to take it back with me."

The truth was that Peter did not want to begin again
to be entangled in the meshes of her delicate web.

"This looks very promising — it's a big undertaking,
isn't it?" she said of his painting.

"Yes," said Peter. "I'm going to work on it all sum-
mer, if I can't make it perfect before !"

"Oh, such ardor!" exclaimed Mrs. Montague. "And
I supposed you would take a nice little vacation. I'm
going to ask some of the ladies you know down for
week-ends, and they will want to see you. I hope you
will give me the pleasure often. By the way, how do
you like my new balcony?"

Workmen had been busy on Mira Mare during the
absence of its mistress, and the outcome was a balcony
from the upper story, like a turret overlooking the sea.

"I've been admiring it," said Peter dutifully. "You'll
look farther out over the sea than anyone else for miles
around."

"Yes, our cottage will be a true Mira Mare," she
replied. "And I'm going to decorate the balcony with
palms from my greenhouse and make it quite an idyllic
Italian retreat; you will want to paint it, I'm sure. I
should read Dante to you while you were painting."

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"I've no doubt that would be very charming," said
Peter. "But somehow, I've gone back to wild nature."

Mrs. Montague smiled ironically.

"May you be faithful to Dame Nature,'* she said.
"But don't neglect the other ladies for her sake !"

She made a light bow and passed on along the beach,
calling to her fox-terrier which had run after her from
Mira Mare. Peter sighed deeply when she was gone.

"Don't like to have ladies butting in when you're at
work, do you?" asked Mr. Woodfin, with a friendly
laugh.

"Oh, I don't mind," said Peter blandly, but he was
really fearing that he might not mind enough, and that
he might be lured again to Mira Mare, to suave dis-
course and the parlor-art that had no kinship with the
sunlight and the sea. What would Virginia say? How
could the vision in his heart that had grown so pale
win back its glow on the ornate balcony of his
patroness ?

"Tell me something about Jack ! How is he getting
on?" Peter asked his old teacher suddenly, to escape
from thoughts of Mrs. Montague.

"Finely, finely!" Mr. Woodfin replied. "I had a let-
ter from him this morning. And you know what he
says in it? Well, he says: Tell Loring to come here
next fall ; Munich's the cmly place for a painter.' "

"So he hasn't forgotten me!" said Peter. "That's
good of him. Do tell me something about his life."

"It's a hard-working life," said Mr. Woodfin. "But
it's a mighty jolly life too. He's living right in the thick
of painters, sculptors, designers, and musicians, too, I
guess. They live kind of a rough life, I suppose, in their

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studios, but they have g^y times enough. This letter
Jack wrote at four o'clock in the morning after a studio
lark. He doesn't say any more about it."

Peter had dropped his right arm to his side and was
listening with complete attention.

"Who knows," he muttered half to himself, "btit that
Munich would be the best place for me too."

"You'd know more artists than you do in GuUport,
surely," said Mr. Woodfin. "Here you only know your
old teacher, who hasn't got a theory to his name and
just paints away — — '^

"He paints away mighty well," interrupted Peter.

"But when you were in Boston this winter," Mn
Woodfin went on, "you might have known quite a
number."

"I might have," said Peter inanely. "But I didn't."

Jack Woodfin's letter did not leave Peter's mind
for days, and he began to think of himself in the artists'
quarter in Munich. He did not speak to his father and
mother about it, although as an independent artist he
no longer had to fear the humiliation of begging for a
favor unwillingly granted. Peter's mother was now as
proud of him as if he were a successful lawyer and her
only fear was that he might grow spoilt in Boston;
Peter's father was no longer reproachful, although he
was still wondering how a son of his had come to
choose such an exotic vocation. He had given Peter
books on history and philosophy, no doubt to counter-
act the frivolity of painting, and Peter had read them
and talked them over in his father's library, quite as if
he had been a college-bred man.

But for all the tranquil harmony in his faome, Peter's

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father and mother would not understand why one
should leave a prosperous career so near one's family
for uncertainty in a foreign land. He could not even
explain this to himself; he only knew that the vision
in his heart had grown pale, and that if he continued
on the broad, pleasant road on which he had started,
the vision would fade altogether. Thus dimly aware of
a danger that no one else in GuUport, except Virginia,
could perceive, he kept postponing his call at Mira Mare.
As Virginia avoided seeing him alone — perhaps be-
cause she regretted her outbreak in the garden, per-
haps because he was not yet redeemed enough in her
•eyes from the offence of being "different" that had
shocked her — and as he had little desire for gaieties
after his season in Boston, Pettr spent most of his
-evenings at home in the library. The days passed with
work or tennis and water sports with his old school-
mates, so that the readiness for the amiable light con-
versation that had been on liis lips so muck^in the city
was now a lost art for Peter.

"I met Mrs. Montague," said Peter's mother one
day. "And she asked why you hadn't been to see her.
You ought to have gone long ago, Peter ! You mustn't
forget all that she has done for you!"

To be sure, Peter was growing ungrateful, and he
must go to see Mrs. Montague that very afternoon. So
he told Mr. Woodfin that he would not sketch the birch
grove in the woods today, and when the town clock had
struck four, he set out for Mira Mare.

"Why, Mr, Loring, I thought you were faithless !" Mrs.
Montague greeted bim breezily.

The sunlight was streaming into her parlor and play-

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ing on her bracelets and long chain of jade and seemed
to be reflected like a steely gleam from her lucid green
eyes. The portrait painter's heart, so long subdued,
leaped within him, and the courtier's tongue, so long
charmed, was loosened all at once.

"I assure you, I don't understand why I haven't beei^
here before," he said eagerly. "If I had been in my
right mind, I should have called here every day. But
you see, I have been steeped in work."

Mrs. Montague looked at him with a skeptical smile.

"More than in Boston?" she asked slyly.

"No, but it's different with landscapes," said Peter.
"The sea won't come to your studio, and you have to
make use of the light as long as you can. But unfortu-
nately I can't talk with the sea as pleasantly as I could
with you when I painted your portrait."

"Oh, the conversation of the sea is safe enough,"
said Mrs. Montague. "But if you associate continually
with that Mr. Woodcock or Mr. Woodchuck — ^aren't
you a little afraid of turning into a bear?"

Now was the time to stand up for his old teacher,
as he had failed to do when his haughty patroness had
made sport of him once before.

"Mr. Woodfin is a first-class landscape painter," said
Peter with some effort, for it was always distasteful to
contradict Mrs. Montague. "It's his misfortune that
he isn't better known."

"It is nobody's misfortune if he isn't known," said
Mrs. Montague with an air of finality. "It is always
his own fault. Anyone who amounts to something is
sure to be discovered. I don't believe in obscure great-
ness."

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Peter, well aware that it was Mrs. Montague who
had discovered him, remained silent.

"You must come up and s?ee the new balcony!" said
his patroness, briskly dispelling the shadow that had
fallen on their discourse.

Peter followed her up two flights of stairs and then
out onto the new balcony.

"A little Italian garden, high up in the air, isn't it,
Mr. Loring?"

"Oh, you should sit under that palm in a dress of a
gorgeous Medici green — ^that would make a picture !"

Mrs. Montague laughed gaily.

"You seem to have guessed why I lured you up
here,*' she said. "I have been thinking lately that I
should rather like to appease a vain and fantastic whim
and have myself painted with this romantic background.
Don't look frightened, Peter. I don't want another
real portrait Uke the one you made last summer! No,
this is to be more a genre picture of the balcony and
its Italian atmosphere, and if possible, to suggest the
width of the view."

Peter felt the tentacles of his old life — ^the life that
he had cast off that June day in Miss Clarissa's gar-
den — grasp him with their tender, but adhesive hold,
and he knew that if he did not tear them off now at
the beginning, they would grow and wind round him
and drag him down — not into an abyss, to be sure, but
into a carpeted man^n where scarlet visions grew
pale.

The balcony was indeed enchanting, an Italian garden
floating high over the endless stretch of deep-blue sea.
Palms, oleander and formal round bay trees in pots

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made an artificial grove, and scarlet geraniums, blue
petunias and fuchsias with nodding bells, planted on the
railing in vine-covered boxes, gleamed brightly against
the even blue of the sky. In a comer, under a palm
tree, was an ornamental basin with goldfish and on the
wicker table stood a vase in form of a Cupid with a
quiver. Mrs. Montague, as she stood by the railing,
looking over the water, seemed to Peter some Italian
Duchess who was resting from heated revels in the cool
of her shady garden. What a dainty picture he could
make of this balcony with its mistress — a rococo pic-
ture, a graceful, ornamental picture with a formal
charm ! The deep-blue ocean should gleam in the back-
ground.

The ocean as background to a toy of an Italian bal-
cony! The idea suddenly shocked Peter as he remem-
bered that he had set his heart on perfecting his great
serious picture of the beach and the sea.

"You are silent, my friend the painter,'* said Mrs.
Montague, waking him out of his meditation.

She laid her hand lightly on his arm, and with her
green eyes looked keenly into Peter's, as if she would
read his most clandestine thought.

Should he yield? Hours of exquisite intimate dis-
course stole into his imagination, enchanting tete-a-
tetes in this airy retreat high above the sea : should he
say "yes"? What would become of his sea-picture?
He could not do both in the same period of time, be-
cause to paint the reflections on the beach he had to
be ready at any time of day to obey the dictates of the
changing tide. So he would have to leave his sea pic-
ture for a time, if he should paint Mrs. Montague now,

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for he knew her impatience and her demand that, once
in her service, he should not divide his attention be-
tween herself and any other subject, even if that other be
the ocean.

"Still silent!" remarked Mrs. Montague.

Her face was very near to his ; a fragrance rose from
her hair. In one instant it was over: he had kissed
Mrs. Montague on her lips! Then startled, as if waking
out of a moment's delirium, he was afraid that he
might have forfeited the favor of his patroness
forever. Humbly he glanced into her eyes, but
they were strangely calm as if nothing had happened,
except for the old gleam of triumph imperfectly sub-
dued.

"You will paint the picture?" she said in a low firm
voice.

The picture ! The woman beside him had made Peter
forget the main issue. Only three minutes ago he had
resolved not to jrield. Was it already too late? If he
refused to fulfill her wish, she had good cause now to
be angry and break widi him altogether — ^and that he
could not bear. , Bu^-if he obeyed . . . after this mo-
ment of rapture^ 4^]||l/iii^ments would follow? Even
out of her, sight> .there would be no peace for him from
tempestuousr thoughts of Mrs. Montague ; her fine-spun
net would enmesh him, and he would be her slave.
Could he still refuse? One step farther, and he could
/nelSfer go back. He must break off harshly.

"Forgive me — please forgive me!" he stammered.
"I made a kind of vow to myself that I wouldn't start
any other work until my sea picture was done — until I
couldn't improve it with another stroke of my brush ! I

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'don't think that you would be so cruel and want me to
break my vow!'*

Mrs. Montague recoiled as if Peter had touched her
hand with hot iron. But in the next moment she looked
at him with a cold, sarcastic smile.

"No, I wouldn't have you break your vow," she said
coolly. "So I suppose my balcony scene must wait till
your sea picture is absolutely perfect. But when that
perfection has been attained, perhaps you will conde-
scend to paint me."

"I don't want to promise anything," said Peter,
roused to resistance by her irony. "I made up my
mind to devote this summer to landscape painHng and
I don't want to make any rash promises. You have no
idea how hard it is for me to refuse you !"

"Oh, very well — it's of no consequence!" said Mrs.
Montague icily and led him down from the balcony.
The silence on the stairs that they had ascended so
gaily was chilling. At the house-door Peter wanted to
seize the hand of his patroness penitently, but she drew
it away and turned round abruptly with a sharp
"Good-by!"

It was all over — ^t he ^ woman who h^ made his career
thought him ungrateful and disloyal — ^and after that
moment of forgetful rapture, too! Peter felt all this
like a dull pain and yet he drew a deep sigh of relief
as if he had escaped a siren — an enticing .siren who
required not only ears to be stopped up, but eyes to be
bandaged. Now he would work at his sea picture with
double zest, without distraction, with his whole heart!

And this Peter did until, on the first day of August,
he stepped back and said to Mr. Woodfin :

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"Is this picture done?"

"I say It's done," replied Mr. Woodfin. "You can't
improve it by another stroke."

"I think it's done too/' said Peter, and carried his
masterpiece home with a secret sense of triumph.

It was always a little chilling not to have anyone in
the house who knew what was good ; but after all, Mr.
Woodfin's approval and his own satisfaction were
enough for the present. In the middle of the sunny,
languid afternoon, when there were few townspeople
abroad, Peter carried the picture, face outward be-
cause the paint was still fresh, through the streets and
into his house. As he heard men's voices indistinctly
from the library, he started to carry his treasure into
his own room, where the indifferent who came to the
house would not annoy him with inane comments.

"Peter!" called his father. "Mr. Atherton is here!"

Maurice Atherton was in GuUport ! No other caller
would have been welcome in this moment, but to him
Peter flew, still holding his painting in his hand.

"Well, well — ^your latest work ? The paint still fresh !"
exclaimed Atherton, when they had barely shaken
hands. "I am really more eager to see this than to see
you!"

"It's my better self," said Peter, happy to have found
an excellent critic.

"Isn't that a little strong?" said Peter's father, put-
ting on his spectacles to look at his son's oversoul in
the form of a painted beach and ocean.

But Peter's eyes hung on Atherton's lips as on, an
oracle's.

"This is the best you have done," spoke the oracle

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at last. "It is ten times better than any of your ladies'
portraits. That reflection on the beach is first-rate and
the wild geese flying give the whole thing a romantic
air. That is good, inspired work, Peter, and I advise
you to keep to landscape painting as long as you can."

Peter was too happy to make any reply.

"I am glad to hear this praise from you, Mr. Ather-
ton," said Peter's father, "because I trust your judg-
ment."

Maurice Atherton had just been on the point of leav-
ing when Peter came, and he had to return now to
Mira Mare where he was visiting for a few days.

"I'll walk back with you," said Peter, and accom-
panied Atherton to Green Shore.

'*I hope I may see you much oftener next jrear," said
Peter. "If I am in Boston again in the autumn, I don't
want to squander so much time in inane society. I'd
rather smoke with you and get your ideas."

"Now unfortunately," replied Maurice Atherton, "I
shall leave for Europe in October. I am going to give
a series of lectures at Oxford in November, and I have
taken a leave of absence for the rest of the year to write
my 'Outlines of Philosophy* in leisure. I shall work at
Oxford probably, for a month or two, and then go down
to Munich "

"To Munich !" Peter cried out, and stood still in the
middle of the street "Why, that's an omen!"

And Peter told Atherton about Jack Woodfin and his
advice and how he himself had considered a flight to
Munich away from his patronesses and his pallid art

"Go!" said Atherton when he had listened with
marked attention. "Go to Munich! That is what you

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need : the sea in summer, and in winter unsparing critics
and life in an air saturated with art. You see," — Maurice
Atherton smiled a rare, enigmatic smile, — ^**you are not
one of those natures who, in the midst of a noisy, rest-
less throng, will float alone on a pool of beauty, serene
and undisturbed; your boat must be driven hither and
thither by many winds, but I believe that it will pass
unharmed through the wildest storm and reach its har-
bor triumphant."

"Oh, why do I need to have such a stormy time!"
exclaimed Peter. "Why can't I float on a pool of
beauty everywhere — like you ?"

They had reached Mira Mare, and Peter left his com-
panion and walked homeward by a round-about way.
Atherton's prophecy was working in his mind, and the
philosopher's praise was making his pulse beat swiftly.
If Atherton and Jack Woodfin both thought that
Munich was the place for him, and if he had an in-
stinctive sense that they were right — why should he not
go? He must go! It would be hard for his mother,
but she had no right to expect that her son could stay
in her neighborhood always. He would not see Vir-
ginia for almost a year, and who knew what she might
not do in that time? That was a consideration indeed.
But Virginia had been so cold to him since that one
sunny day in Miss Clarissa's garden; he was not yet
redeemed in her eyes — and what could redeem him bet-
ter than a year of hard and inspired work and the bold
achievement for which he hoped ? Then he would come
back as a great painter and win his beloved ! Had she
not waked him out of his winter sleep and shown him
how his vision had grown pale?

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What would Mrs. Montague say? It shocked Peter
suddenly that he dreaded his parting from Mrs. Mon-
tague more than absence from Virginia, the one love
of his boyhood and youth. Could this be possible?
But the fine threads that his patroness had spun round
him during the winters when he had been the lapdog of
her fancy had bound him fast in spite of the rupture on
the balcony. Now that his sea picture was finished, he
had no excuse for refusing her rococo picture any
longer. Then, if he should start on this alluring task,
he knew what would follow: he would meet the insipid
guests at Mira Mare, receive new orders for the win-
ter and a long list of vague invitations. Not only
the temptress herself, but all her train would rob his
freedom !

No — ^he would not let it come to that! He would
leave now before he could begpin the rococo picture,
while his will was free ! He would declare to his father
this very day that he must go, and sail next week. So
Peter made plans for his journey: he would travel a
little through Germany before he settled down in Mu-
nich, for he was an independent artist now — not a
student sent by his father; and then he would take a
studio somewhere near Jack Woodfin and begin his
new life.

When Peter came home, he found that his father and
mother had gone for a walk, and to his relief, he could
make plans a little longer in luxurious secrecy. He
searched for an old atlas in the library — ^his only
Baedeker was one of France — ^and bent over a map of
Bavaria, until a touch on his shoulder called him back
from his airy travels.

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"What are you studying the old atlas for?" asked
Peter's father in a placid, kindly tone. "Are you plan-
ining a journey?"

Peter nodded soberly.

"Why — where do you want to go ?" asked Peter's father,
evidently astonished by his son's seriousness. Peter's
father and mother never had any desire to travel, and
it always seemed to them something unnatural when
any of the townspeople preferred another abode, if only
for a few months, to GuUport. So Peter sighed a little
wearily before he answered:

**I want to go to Munich for the winter."

"To Munich!" exclaimed his father. "To Munich!"

He sank into his armchair, took off his spectacles,
rubbed them with his handkerchief and put them on
again.

"Why do you want to go to a foreign country," he
asked, "when you are started so well in Boston here?
You said yourself that you had more orders last year
than you ever dreamed you would have and that you
had prospects for many more next winter. Who knows
you in Munich?"

"Jack Woodfin, for one," said Peter. "He wanted me
to go there in the first place. And your friend Atherton
advised me most ardently to go there. He is going to
be in Munich himself next winter."

"Atherton has always led an erratic life," said Peter's
father. "He is not rooted anywhere — ^he has no home
ties. But why you, with your home so near your work,
should want to go to a foreign country, I don't under-
stand."

How could Peter's father understand, when he had

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not yet understood what an artist was — ^how could
Peter make it clear?

"If I were a young clergyman somewhere near
home," he began, "and if I were called to another
parish — ^would you say I ought to refuse because it
would be wrong to go away?"

"But this isn't a call," replied Peter's father, "This
is only a whim, as far as I can see."

"It isn't a whim at all," said Peter. "It is a serious
decision ; I want to go simply because I know I should
do much better work there."

"But I understand your work is good now," his
father returned. "I thought the ladies you painted were
satisfied "

Peter winced at the word "ladies" and exclaimed :

"But I'm not satisfied, and that^s the main point ! And
I haven't any name among my colleagues. And I know
Munich will be a better place to work in — ^besides, I
should probably come back in summer."

''Well, you are independent now," said Peter's father,
resigned. "We have no right to keep you at home.
All I can say is that I am sorry, Peter, and I cannot
understand. There's your mother! Mary," he said to
Peter's mother who came in timidly, as she always did
when she found her husband and son in serious con-
versation, "Peter wants to leave us and go to Munich !"

A cloud swept over the face of Peter's mother, and
it was even harder for Peter to win her approval than
his father's. When he said at last that he wanted to
sail next week so that he might travel a little and yet
be established at his new studio in September, tears
were glistening in his mother's eyes. How he would

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have liked to tell her that it was not for the pleasure of
a little traveling that he wanted to leave her so soon,
but for reasons more potent — ^reasons, alas, that she
could not understand! Instead, he laughed and said
lightly :

"After all, it won't be any different from the year I
was in Paris; you got on very well without me then/'

"But I have heard that the artists in Munich lead a
very wild Bohemian life," his mother still objected.

"But I'm not an infant, mother," Peter replied. "You
must remember I'm twenty-six."

Finally Peter's mother, too, was resigned, and now
there remained the most difficult task of all — ^the refusal
to paint Mrs. Montague's picture. In his dreams at
night he saw the sinister frown on his patroness'
haughty brow and he woke up with a fear that he
might be banned from her gracious favor forever.

In the morning he started out for Mira Mare, so that
he might find her free from guests and talk with her
alone. Mrs. Montague came into the room in a peach-
colored negligee of bewildering intricacy, and held an
opalescent bowl with water in one hand and in her arms
a profusion of roses, which she began to arrange on a
little table with effective mock-domesticity. After some
bland apologies for his early call, Peter watched her in
silence, loathing to begin. The throbJ>ing of his heart
seemed like the beating of a drum.

"Well — ?" Mrs. Montague raised her eyebrows and
looked at him with calm curiosity.

"I've come to tell you," he said lamely at last, "that
I'm very sorry I can't paint your picture on the balcony,
because I'm going to start for Munich next week."

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Mrs. Montague raised her eyebrows still higher, and
continued to play with the roses.

"That's too bad/' she said politely. "For how long
are you planning your trip?"

"I plan to spend the winter in Munich," Peter replied.

"Indeed!" Mrs. Montague turned round sharply and
looked at him with her sarcastic smile. "So we are not
going to have the honor this winter I What inspired
you with that change of program?"

How should he answer now! Surely not with the
truth!

"I thought I ought to try the real artists' life abroad
for a while," he said reluctantly.

"A touch of Boheme— eh?" mocked Mrs. Montague.

"Yes, I suppose that is it," said Peter meekly.

"Is there such a hurry," she asked, "that you can*t
paint another picture first?"

What inquisition! How could he tell her that he
was fleeing out of her reach?

"I'm sorry," he said awkwardly. "But I have to
travel a little — ^and I have to get settled in my new
studio as early as possible."

"So you prefer Munich — ^" she mused. "A year ago
you were not so scornful of my orders !"

This thrust, made in a casual, seemingly absent-
minded way, wounded Peter to the quick. How base
his ingratitude must seem to her without whose help
and kindness he would not now be holding his head
high and choosing his own course in the face of oppor-
tunity ! The adoring page in him woke up to remorse,
and longed to throw himself at the feet of his queen.

"Mrs. Montague!" cried Peter, "don't think that I

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value lightly all that you have done for me. I know
that you have made my career. Without you, no doubt,
I should be a failure today. You don't know how hard
it is for me '*

Mrs. Montague raised her hand with a silencing ges-
ture.

"Don't grow melodramatic,** she said with humiliat-
ing irony on her lips. "You have good reasons, no
doubt, for going to Munich, and I should be the last to
question you about them. I wish you the best success,
and a good voyage."

There was a tone of dismissal in her voice that gave
Peter a deep wound. He did not know whether he
adored or hated Mrs. Montague. He seized her hand
and kissed it in a furious passion.

"I adored you !" he cried. "It breaks my heart to go
away. Forgive me — I owe you so much— too much—
I thank you a thousand times for "

"Don't thank me!" she cut him short, and drew her
hand away. "Good-byl I hope to have the pleasure
when you come back from Munich. My regards to
your mother 1"

Peter could not go home now, but wandered about dully
for over an hour, seeing again with the wide-awake eye
of his mind every glance and gesture of Mrs. Mon-
tague's, and when he came home he spoke little, but
brooded over his grief in bitterness. It seemed as if his
life of the last two years lay before his memory in ruins.
But as the days elapsed, his sorrow gradually gave way
to a sense of relief that he had broken the spell and
freed himself from Mrs. Montague's necromancy.

Now there was no other obstacle in his way, for Vir-

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ginia and Atherton and especially Mr. Woodfin would
applaud his decision and wish him Godspeed, and Dick
and Ted Raffles and Timothy Simpkins, thought they
would think him mad for cutting short his summer vaca*
tion at home, yet would not hold him back.

So Peter engaged his passage for Thursday of the
following week. Then he tormented his old teacher
with questions about Jack Woodfin's life in Munich and
the hermit seemed proud that Peter was following his
son.

"It'll seem like having two sons in Munich/' he said
in his gruflf voice.

Peter gave his masterpiece, the sea picture on which
he had worked with such ardor, into Mr. Woodfin's
hands that he should send it to his Landscape Society
in Boston which had its exhibition in the fall.

"They'll take it surely," commented his teacher.

Peter thought of his dejection in the winter when his
landscape had been refused and he gave a sign of relief
that he was not going back to his dull studio in Boston,
the scene of mundane conversation with bland-faced
ladies whose portraits he had to paint. In Munich he
would have models after his heart I

At last came the hour when he must say good-by to
Virginia. She had been away on a visit and had come
back only the day before Peter's departure, perhaps—
Peter dared hope — because she had heard from her
mother that he was going away.

Peter found her on her porch, swinging in the
Gloucester hammock, with a book beside her.

"What are you reading?" he asked, anxious not to
make his farewell solemn, lest it should grow too hard
for him and too easy for her.

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" 'Cyrano'/' she answered. "I always read it once a
year. He's one of my best friends."

"I see you can be faithful," remarked Peter, as he
perched on the railing beside the hammock.

"You're going away — ?" asked Virginia blandly.

"Yes," answered Peter. "I'm going to Munich.
Jack Woodfin is there. I'm going to have a studio there
too."

"Oh, then you won't have to paint stupid old women
any more!" cried Virginia with sudden enthusiasm.

The barrier between them — ^that uncertain strain that
had kept them apart even after the hour in Miss Claris-
sa's garden — ^now fell down.

"Yes," said Peter. "I'm going to be a free artist; I
am not going to consider a soul "

"Except your own !" said Virginia.

"I sha'n't even consider that," said Peter with bravado.
"Only my art."

Virginia laughed merrily.

"Well," she cried, "you've acquired some panache
since June."

'' 'Panache" t' responded Peter. "What does that
mean?"

Virginia opened her book and pointed at the last
words of the play : "Mon panache !"

"It's what Cyrano kept to the last," said Virginia.
"It's the plume on his hat — ^it's what chivalry was made
of — ^it's something absurd, it's a grand kind of foolish-
ness — ^it is dash — it's a dare-devil kind of joy ..."

"That's what Jack Woodfin says you get in Munich,"
said Peter laughing. "Onl^ he didn't say it like that!
Well, I knew you would approve of my going, and I'm
mighty glad — only I'm a little sorry, too."

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"You want me to miss you— eh?*' said Virginia mis-
chievously.

"Yes," said Peter. "I am hoping you wiU miss me,
and when I come back . . • Oh, I have an idea!" he
cied out suddenly. "Why don't you go to Munich to
study singing — ^you might as well go there as to
Paris • . . Then we'll go to the opera together ^"

"Oh, Peter P' Virginia broke in. "What do you
think ! Father wouldn't let me go away again, now that
he has his family back after so many years. And if I
do travel, I will have to stay with mother in a languid
southern climate. No, III have to be content with
lessons in Boston once a week."

"How sad!" cried Peter, disappointed. "Anyway, I
want you to write me about every song you sing."

"Oh dear!" replied Virginia. "What a task! But
then I'm going to be exacting too. I want you to write
me about every picture you paint — ^that's too easy,
though, because I could sing hundreds of songs while
you paint one picture. No, that isn't enough. So I'm
going to ask something else" — ^her eyes were all at once
aglow with a lovely inspired light, and Peter knew in
this moment without a doubt that he loved her and
that he was going to Munich to be a great artist for
her sake — ^"I'm going to ask you to write me about
every vision you see!"

"There is only one vision for me," said Peter. "Pray
for me that it may turn bright again over there, be*
cause in Boston it has grown quite pale !"

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CHAPTER X

THE SCULPTRESS

JACK WOODFIN and Peter sat smoking in the
comer of the little catt where they were accustomed
to meet after supper with a group of artists who would
linger over their coffee in spirited debate. Peter had
taken pains to learn German fast during his journey
up the Rhine, then through the Tyrol and the Bavarian
Alps, and now, with Jack Woodfin's help, he had ad-
vanced far enough to join in his colleagues' disputes.

"What did we fight about tonight?" Peter asked his
companion, for they were alone at their table now. "I've
quite forgotten."

"Oh, I don't remember either," replied Jack. "But
it doesn't matter. It's good to have dispute^ — ^always
better than to agree : it's good for one's art."

"Everything in Munich is good for one's art,'* said
Peter.

"So you're satisfied?" asked Jack Woodfin in his
gruff voice, with a twinkle in his black eyes.

Peter nodded in content and watched the rings of
smoke from his cigarette. The whole room was full of
smoke, so that the inmates whose voices made a con-
tinuous buzz were but dimly visible, as through a thick
veil. From one comer melodious laughter started

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often and died down again, till Peter fixed his eyes in
its direction and when the fog of smoke had lifted, saw
that it came from the only woman in a group of lively,
gesticulating men. Peter looked hard: that pale face
with the jet-black hair, that pathetic, wistful profile, that
mouth with the drooping comers — ^when had he
dreamed of these? He laid his hand on his* forehead
and began to think, but just in the very moment when
memory illumined his mind, the puzzling woman in the
corner caught his eye, smiled in a quick, fitful way and,
leaving her group abruptly, came toward him with out-
stretched hand. Peter started to meet her: she was
C6cile Kirov, Chabrier's friend, whom he had met at
the cafe nights in Paris.

"Mademoiselle!" he cried. "What a happy surprise
to find you here !"

"Let me sit with you a while,*' she said in English
with her droll Russian accent. "They are having a wild
discussion over there, and I need a little rest. Oh, but
pardon me — ^you have a friend. Ah, it's Mr. Woodfin !
How-do-you-do ?"

"You know each other?" asked Peter, astonished,
although, since his establishment in Munich, he had
found some surprise every day.

"Who doesn't know Cecile Kirov?" said Jack Wood-
fin in his brusque, hearty way. "She's the best sculp-
tress we have in Munich. You're behind times, Peter !'*

Cecile Kirov laughed her low, rippling laugh as she
sat down at the little round table with them and lit her
cigarette.

"Did you go to Munich directly from Paris?" she
asked. Though her native tongue was Russian, as

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Peter remembered from what Chabrier had told him,
she had spoken English, French and German from her
childhood.

"No, I've been at home two years," said Peter. "But
Mr. Woodfin prescribed Munich for my art."

"Loring was a fashionable portrait painter," explained
Jack Woodfin, "and had more orders to paint inane
society women than he could fill."

"Whoo!'* Cecile made a wistful outcry of admira-
tion. "More orders than you could fill ! And were the
women so very dull that you came here ?"

"My paintings were dull," said Peter. "That's why I
came here."

"I understand," said Cecile. "You could not paint
dull pictures here. There is no dullness in Munich; it
is a very gay and happy life."

How quickly this stranger understood what only a
few chosen spirits could g^sp at home, what his father
and mother did not understand to this day!

"It is indeed," cried Peter in his new enthusiasm.
"Munich is a paradise for painters !"

"Not quite a paradise," said C6cile with a tired smile.
"There are not enough fruit trees in it."

She looked at Peter with her large light gray eyes
that were odd and appealing under the jet-black brows.

"You must come to my studio," she exclaimed im-
pulsively. "I have a nice mountain boy that I want you
to see. You too, Mr. Woodfin."

"You haven't been at my studio now for over a
month," said Jack. "I'm offended."

"Hard work, hard work!" replied C6cile. "Hard
work all day, and festivities all night. But I will come.

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And to yours, too, Mr. Loring, if you want me to see
your pictures."

"Do, do !" cried Peter. "I have only sketches as yet,
but I'd like to have your opinion."

"By the way, Loring," said Jack. "I have a first-
class model for you: a perfect Carmen, quite young —
a real gypsy. Black hair, nut-brown skin, eyes like
coals, and she wears a jolly gypsy dress for me, green
and scarlet, half in rags."

"Oh, is she something for me, too?" asked Cecile
eagerly.

"No, nothing for a sculptor," Jack Woodfin replied.
"All color — ^but you could make something out of her,
Loring."

"Oh, I envy you painters!" sighed Cecile. "A scar-
let ribbon, a sunbeam in a window are subjects enough
for you. But we sculptors must have such solid things
. . . You'll like my little highland boy," she said, turn-
ing her clear gray eyes on Peter. "He has more life
than my others. But I am going to see your work
first . . . perhaps you are too great now anyway to
look at mine."

"Nonsense!" replied Peter. "Come tomorrow. I'm
next door to Woodfin."

"Too much work!" she said. "Let's say the day after
tomorrow."

"Very well," answered Peter. "But in the morn-
ing — ^then you can have the best light on my pictures."

"Au revoirl" Cecile gave each her hand abruptly
and slipped back to the group of men in the comer, who
were now eyeing Jack and Peter.

The two friends left the cafe and started to walk

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home by a roundabout route. The streets were quiet
and the bright half-moon made the smooth pavement
gleam silvery white like ice.

"Let's walk along the street to the Maximilian
bridge," said Jack. "It's too good a night to go in-
doors."

Though he lived in the city, Jack Woodfin, as the
true son of his father, was a great lover of nature and
had shown Peter all the charming walks in the sur-
rounding country. Now they were marching together
in silence.

"Do you know Cecile well?" Peter began slowly.

"I see her now and then," Jack answered. "But you
know, since my affair with Minna, I've kept away from
women as well as I could."

Peter knew through gossip, though Jack had never
alluded to it before, that his colleague had lived for a
year or so in the fashion of Boheme, with a young artist
named Minna who had one day vanished miraculously
and left Jack embittered against all womankind.

"Cecile's a very good sort," Jack continued. "Works
like a slave. She's a poor little devil, and lives from
feast to famine. Her work is mighty respectable, too.
But she isn't the vogue. There was quite a number of
her things in the last sculpture exhibit and she won a
prize, I believe, but hasn't sold a thing."

That accounted for the wistful note in C6cile's voice,
and the tired droop of her mouth !

"She looks worn out," remarked Peter aloud.

"It isn't only worry about her daily bread that makes
her look like that," said Jack Woodfin slowly,

Peter's curiosity was alert.

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"What else is it then?" he asked with more eager-
ness than he intended.

"Why, last winter," Jack replied, "she was living with
a Russian fellow — a sculptor too ..."

"Oh, I remember now," cried Peter. *'A Russian
sculptor was with her when I met her through Chabrier
in Paris — b, great big swaggering fellow he was, with a
coarse black moustache "

"Oh, that's he," said Jack. "And last May, I guess,
they quarreled, and all at once he was gone, and she
was left a wreck."

They had reached the Maximilian bridge and stood
still to look across the river at the Maximilianeum, the
great military school that loomed up in the enhancing
moonlight like a romantic castle among the trees on the
steep embankment. The river Isar was roaring be-
neath them, and though the moon gave it a ghostly
silver gleam, Peter knew that by day it was a cool, light
green, and he felt the soothing freshness of the color
that he could not see.

The beauty before them made both silent and medita-
tive, and Peter sighed from a sorrow that was not his
own. Poor C6cile! There was nothing more to ask
about her, there was nothing more to say, but he
could not forget the plaintive appeal in her eyes. So
he and Jack walked in a silence only broken, now and
then, by a stray idle remark, till Peter left his companion
and climbed up the three steep flights of stairs to his
studio. In the dark he felt for his candle and matches,
and overcome by drowsiness, went quickly to bed and
fell into a dreamless sleep.

The next morning he went directly to Jack Woodfin's

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studio to look at the gypsy model. Peter had to knock
three times before Jack answered, and then only with a
grunt, for he was deep in work. The model was indeed
a treasure for a painter — a wild brown creature, of
surely no more than sixteen years, with straggly, coarse
black hair falling over her bare brown shoulder and her
scarlet rags. When she should be his own model, how-
ever, Peter would not have her lie on a rug, as if she
were sunning herself on a heath which Jack actually
painted on his canvas — ^no, Peter would have her dance
and fling up her thin brown arms with a tambourine in
one hand. He must have her tomorrow 1 Jack's pic-
ture, though, was excellent.

"You're a wizard!" exclaimed Peter, as he sat down
on a box covered with a rug and watched his colleague
paint. "You've conjured up a true hot August day
with a gypsy lying by the roadside I"

"I'm just putting on the finishing strokes," said
Jack. "Take a cigarette-— on that table behind the
Athene — yes, those ! — ^then I'll engage her for you."

"I want her tomorrow," said Peter.

"She's much in demand," Jack replied. "But we'll
see. Fortunately the child's a dunce; so you're not
tempted to flirt with her. The spell's broken when she
opens her mouth. That's a very good thing — ^you're
not distracted, and you can work away at a fine rate."

All these remarks could be made safely in English,
while the innocent gypsy stared into the void. Peter
lit his cigarette and planned his own painting in bril-
liant details. His morning visits to Jack Woodfin were
not infrequent, for Jack's studio had acquired the gen-
uine studio air which Peter's, as that of a newcomer.

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could not yet boast. For here there were old dusty
draperies, ecclesiastical relics — rosaries, icons, ivory
Madonnas — ^mixed with inspired disorder among Tan-
agra figures, stuflfed owls and parrots, fantastic candle-
sticks, cigarettes, oranges and apples. Peter lingered
till Jack's painting was finished and the model secured
for the next day. Then he looked at his friend's work
with a critical eye, gave him some frank opinions and,
with lively talking and smoking, the morning was gone.
Peter was not niggardly with his time nowadays, as he
had been the last winter at home, for studio talks or long
tramps in the country with a colleague now seemed to
him as good preparations for work as the painting
of studies and sketches. For his pastimes here in
Munich were not distractions from his art: on the con-
trary, art was their starting-point, and they led back
to art.

But the next day, when Peter had the bright gypsy
model in his own bare studio, he plunged into work.
She had brought her tambourine and posed with one
bare brown foot stepping forward as in a dance, her
arms flung up in gypsy abandon. The scarlet of her
ragged dress, the black of her hair and the copper shade
of her skin made Peter work in a fever. Till now he
had made only sketches since he had settled in Munich ;
this should be his first large picture.

Even after the model had left, he worked on from
memory, and early the next morning he was drawn to
his new canvas. Greedily he used every moment of the
short period in which the gypsy could hold her hard
pose of gaiety and caprice; silently he worked, forget-
ting that his model breathed and had a human tongue

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and was something beside brilliant colors and wild»
rhythmic lines. He worked in a frenzy • • .

A knock I Cursed he who disturbed him in this
precious half-hour before the model left! The janitor's
stout, florid wife popped in her disheveled head and
announced a lady who did not give her name. Peter
beat his forehead: how could he forget Cecile in his
infatuation with his work? He told the janitor's wife
to send the lady up, dismissed the model half an hour
early, to the young creature's joy, and began to walk
downstairs to meet Cecile.

^'Confess you had forgotten I was coming," she
greeted him, but Peter would not confess.

"I am happjr you have come," he said truthfully. "I
wish I had more of a studio to show you T

"Oh !" she uttered with a quick shrug of her shoul-
ders, as she looked round frankly. "Yours is a palace
to mine ! I have no sketches for my wall, you know —
that always makes your painters' rooms so bright
and jolly. I have only gray figures standing about,
and the smell of wet clay all night. Oh, what are you
doing there?" she cried, as her eye fell on the fresh can-
vas. "Is that Woodfin's model?"

"Oh, it's only begun," cried Peter. "You mustn't
look at it yet. I want it to be my chef-d'oeuvre."

Frankly he had told her in the first ten minutes the
ambition that was just now burning most ardently in
his heart ; frankly he had spoken out his ideas ever since
he had come to Munich: for everjrthing here among
the artists was done frankly without fear of the neigh-
bor's opinion.

"Then you must send it to the winter exhibition,"

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exclaimed C6cile with enthusiasm. ''You and Woodfin
both — and see who wins— or perhaps both will get in.
I like your sketches!"

She walked along the walls, looking with sharp eyes
at the sketches and making comments here and there,
then threw herself, suddenly relaxed, into the one arm-
chair of Peter's studio.

'I'm tired," she said, opening wide her appealing gray
eyes.

In this moment Peter recalled how one day at home,
soon after his return from Paris, Mrs. Montague's face
had interested him because of its resemblance to Cecile's.
How strange that seemed to him now! Surely, there
was no visible resemblance; but perhaps the hidden
bitterness that made one guess and wonder was the
same in both. No — Cecile's bitterness was not hidden
like Mrs. Montague's, behind cool, green glances and
ironic smiles ; her sorrow was frank, like all things in this
new sphere.

"You're working too hard," said Peter.

"I know it," Cecile replied, lighting a cigarette com-
placently. "But I'm happy only when I work myself
to death."

"You won't be, though, when you break down," said
Peter wisely.

Cecile laughed her low melodious laugh.

"I have broken down many times," she said. "But
what does that matter? It only mattered once, though,
and that was last summer, when I went home for rest.
And, I tell you, better hard work in a hole of a studio
than life in a bourgeois town after you have known
Boheme!"

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Peter wondered if his experience would be the same
on his return home.

"Why?" he asked blandly.

"I had two months of Philistine life at my brother's
house in a small Russian town. My brother's wife
asked me why I modeled — ^if the clay did not feel moist
and unpleasant in my hand. . . . My brother's wife gave
coffee parties in the afternoon and the good ladies told
how Mrs. A's cook had gone away after she had received
such a good woolen blouse for Christmas, and Mrs. B's
baby had the whooping cough, and Mrs. C had not invited
Mrs. D to her sewing circle, until I wished Mrs. A, B,
C and D, all the way through the alphabet, at the bot-
tom of the sea and myself too . . . Well, I'm back in
my Munich, and needn't complain."

"Are you the only artist in your family?" asked
Peter, aware of a great curiosity about this frail, wistful
sculptor who was reclining at ease in his armchair,
dressed in simple gray with only a fresh crimson rose at
her belt for ornament.

"My mother was a sculptor, a French woman — ^Ren6e
Laroche — ^perhaps you've heard of her? No? My
father met her when he was studying medicine in the
Sorbonne. She died young — of too much Philistine
existence, I suppose . . . but you don't want to hear
my life history! That's the beauty of our artist life
here, that nobody asks about the other man's past,
don't you think so, Mr. Loring? What we can do
counts — ^nothing else."

"And what we are," said Peter.

C6cile shrugged her shoulders.

"What are we artists but what we can do ?" she said,

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fixing her lucid gray eyes on his. "If I am not my
sculpture, I am nothing, I'm not worth living."

"You are a true artist !" cried Peter in honest admira-
tion. "I wish I had known you long ago !"

Cecile laughed in her low, rippling way.

"There's still time to become good friends,** she said.

"Oh, we must!" cried Peter. "We must have
rendezvous at our little cafe — you and Woodfin and I,
and then *'

"Are you going to the artists' fSte tomorrow night in
the Loewenhaus?" she interrupted him.

Peter shook his head.

"You ought to come !" she said. "I will tell them to
send you a ticket. All your friends will be there. These
balls are merry — ^they make you forget your sorrows —
or perhaps you have no sorrows?"

Peter thought of the Russian sculptor with whom he
had seen Cecile in Paris and of what Jack Woodfin had
told him the other night ; then, all at once, he felt like
a schoolboy before this pale, ardent woman who could
not be more than his own age and had already drunk
deeply from the bitter cup of grief.

"I have none at all in Munich,** he replied. "And
I'll come to the fete and we'll laugh and dance all night!"

"Bravo !" cried Cecile, clapping her hands. "Tomor-
row night then ! Good-by !"

She had risen quickly and shook hands with him at
the door in the cordial manner of a comrade.

He started to accompany her down the stairs, but she
flew down like a pursued bird.

"Don't!'* she cried. "No escorting, please, and such!
nonsense ! We are colleagues !"

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And in a twinkling she was out of sight

The postman instead was looking up at him from
the foot of the stairs.

"A letter for youT* he cried, and Peter came down to
get it.

A letter from Virginia — ^the second, since he had left
home. This was only a short one, however. Oh, what
startling news !

You wHl be surprised to hear [she wrote] that soon we are not
going to be so very far apart any more, quite near neighbors, in
fact— comparatively. Mother has been ordered to go to Bozen,
and that is not so very far from Munich, you know.

What joyivl news ! Peter threw himself into his arm-
chair and mused, with the letter spread out on his knee.
What joyful news! And yet, somehow, he could not
find quite the joy that he would expect at such news!
How strange that was . . . how queer . . . how hard to
understand. . . .

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CHAPTER XI

BOH&ME

TWENTY candles were burning at midnight in Peter's
and Cecile's common studio, for it was a gala night,
and red wine was gleaming in the glasses, and Cecile
wore her white gown of fete and her earrings, and all
the ladies were sparkling and lighthearted, and a blond
fellow was tuning his flute. For Jack's painting and
Peter's — ^the "Gypsy in the Sun'' and the "Dancing
Gypsy" — ^had both been accepted for the Winter Ex-
hibition, and tonight was the celebration.

''Walters, play a very tearful melody !" cried Hartung,
the most jovial of Peter's colleagues, to the young man
with the flute. "That will make us all the gayer."

And the tall blond youth played a lachrymose air,
while the revelers, grouped on the divan, chairs and
boxes, hushed their jesting and merriment and listened
languidly with gleaming eyes and laughter still linger-
ing on their lips. Peter looked about in happy bewild-
erment: all these brilliant and jolly people were rejoic-
ing because of his success in the gayest, heartiest good-
fellowship. Envious tongues were wagging outside,
but in this small, candle-lit studio all were friends, and
he and Jack, strangers from a foreign land, were the
heroes of their fete.

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The flute ceased languidly like a wind dying down.

"Oh, more, more!" cried Vira, the cousin of C6cile,
wlio, dressed in sumptuous purple velvet like a peacock
among her simpler colleagues, was reclining on the
divan beside Jack. "Go on, I was just having an in-
spiration V*

Then there was a great burst of laughter, for Vira,
Russian and dark like C^ile, but of a more imposing
and less delicate beauty, was the only drone among
these bees, who with much buzzing was always an-
nouncing an inspiration, but who never had, like the
others, any harvest of golden honey to show.

"Perhaps another inspiration will come if our Lieu-
tenant will strike up a waltz P* cried a majestic middle-
aged woman with a profusion of yellow forelocks, who
was nicknamed the "Dowager Empress" and was the
best miniature painter in the city. "Walter's flute was
exquisite, but I, for one, think it is time to dance."

The Lieutenant was Hartung, who was so called be-
cause he had been an army ofHcer until he had ex-
changed the sword for the paint-brush. His eyes were
bright blue and always sparkling as if a joke were
lurking in their depths; his hair was thick and blond,
but with a strange bald place that was said to come
from a scar on his forehead received in a dueL

"His hair feU out,
In a single bout"

Peter whispered to Jack in English, then he walked
up to the piano — a piano that belonged to a music student
who allowed Peter the use of it in return for the priv-

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ilege of practicing in the studio— and slapped Hartung
on the shoulder heartily :

"Now play with dash, my boy!'* he cried. "We must
have a night of it!'*

Chairs and boxes were swiftly pushed to the wall, the
big easel was shoved away into a safe comer.

"Remember that we are celebrating 'The Dancing
Gypsy,' " C6cile said to Peter, laughing mischievously.
The pathetic, hungry look had fled from her eyes since
she and Peter had set up their studio-household to-
gether, and she was making merry with the merry-
makers, dancing with almost a wild abandon, as if she
were flinging away her griefs and cares. The studio
was a narrow ballroom, but as there were only six ladies
at this revel, they had space enough for their gaiety.

"With Hartung pla)ring, we could dance in a prison
cell, couldn't we, love?" said Peter, during a dance, to
C6cile.

The music stopped, and they rested on the divan.

"Cecile won't let me paint her," said Peter to Jack
who stood watching them.

Cecile laughed her rippling, melodious laugh.

"No," she said. "I have my work to do, my friend!
What do you suppose? Do you think I can idle away
my mornings?"

"I'm tired of professional models," Peter complained.
"I can't look at another of their stupid faces."

"Take Heller!" suggested Cecile, with a nod toward
a sculptor standing by the piano, who with his odd,
weatherbeaten face, shaggy hair, part blond and part
gray, and small, keen blue eyes made a good subject
indeed.

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"That's an idea!" cried Peter. "Will he submit, do
you suppose?"

Cecile called Heller and Peter made his request.

"C^cile refused/' said Peter. "And you are the next
best subject in Munich."

Heller shook his Pan-like head.

"My Bacchante comes before you!" he said with a
jovial grin.

"But when your Bacchante is done," pleaded C6cile.

"She will never be done," said the sculptor.

"I have an idea!" cried Peter. "Let me paint you
while you're working on your Bacchante — I won't dis-
turb you a bit — I'll paint quietly in a corner of your
studio. Oh, it shall be the most inspired picture I have
ever done: The Sculptor and His Work.'^ The Bac-
chante shall be as conspicuous as her maker. Will that
win you over?"

The Bacchante, on which he had been working for
months, was dear to Heller like a child and when
anyone spoke of her his eyes beamed with a paternal
light.

"You can't resist that now !" teased C6cile.

"If you are so eager to help immortalize my Bac-
chante," Heller yielded. "Why— come to my room to-
morrow, and well talk it over."

"Bravo!" cried Cecile. "What a picture that will
make!"

Just then Hartung struck up a jovial tune, and Peter
spun round with Cecile dizzily, while his mind was afire
with the idea of his new work.

Dancing, laughter, red wine, dripping candles, a room
that spun round, eyes with veils of drowsiness drawn

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over the gleams of merriment — ^all this Peter saw as in
a happy trance, till the city hall clock struck four.

"My model is coming at ten!" whispered Cecile.
*'Good-by, sleep!"

"'What has night to do with sleep?'" quoted Peter
drowsily, when after breezy farewells the revelers had
left them alone.

Peter slept till noon and woke up shocked to find
that Cecile had begun work at ten while he had been
deep in dreams. After hurriedly eating the breakfast
that C6cile cooked for him on their little oil stove dur-
ing a pause in her work, he went straight to Heller's
studio. As Peter opened the door, he found the
sculptor bending over his beloved work, with an ardent
glow on his faun's face. When he heard Peter, he
turned his head round, still keeping his hands on the
clay figure, and laughed merrily.

"Stay!" cried Peter. "Don't stir!"

He snatched a small block of drawing paper and a
pencil out of his pocket, and with feverish strokes made
a rough sketch of the jovial sculptor with his wild danc-
ing Bacchante.

"Now!" cried Peter, with a sigh of relief, "you can
move again. I have caught you. Now I know what I
want my big picture to be. I must catch that one
moment again in colors, and I will if it takes me
months !"

So Peter found his new task and, buoyed up by the
success of his "Dancing G)rpsy" and the generous inter-
est of Cecile and Jack and his odd, shaggy model him-
self, he worked with daily growing zest.

"Tell me what you think of my 'Heller with Bac-

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chante'?" said Peter to Jack one night when they were
alone together in their favorite smoky cafe.

"Why, you've got first-rate technique," Jack
answered. "A lot of dash — all your things are mighty
clever!"

Clever — ^technique! Those two words Peter kept
hearing as his colleagues commented on his studies and
even on his finished "Dancing Gypsy." At the bottom
of his heart he wished that the words "brilliant" and
"art" might take the place of the refrain "clever —
technique," but this wish he smotherd in silence, for,
after all, to have a picture exhibited so soon in Munich
gave him no Mttle satisfaction. Critics, to be sure, had
not all been favorable; some had called his work shal-
low, and one had even dared to libel it "cheap"; but
Peter's spirits were high and could hot be subdued by
the wagging of sharp tongues.

"Look at our countryman over there !" said Jack sud-
denly. "How bored he looks! Doesn't he seem out of
place?"

"Where?" asked Peter and turned in the direction
that Jack indicated with a nod of his head.

"Why!" Peter exclaimed. "If that isn't Harold!"

"What Harold?" said Jack.

"Don't you know Harold Montague?" returned
Peter. "Mrs. Montague's son — from our own Gullport?"

"I'm a stranger in my own home town, you must
remember !" said Jack.

But Peter darted to the table where Harold sat smok-
ing alone and obviously bored.

"Hallo, Harold!" Peter roused him out of his
reveries.

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*'Why, Peter!" cried Harold. "This is jolly! How
are you?"

"I'm more than happy," said Peter. "And you?
What brings you to Munich ?*'

"I'm going round the world. My mother thought I
needed to broaden my education — ^law is too narrow-
ing!" Harold said with a sarcastic smile. "And to say
the truth, I was a little bored at home. So I'm wend-
ing my way round the world."

Peter introduced Harold and Jack and all three sat
down and smoked together.

"I came in here," said Harold, "because I was told I
might see genuine artist life in this place, and what do
I find but two men from Gullport, Mass. ?"

"You can't come from the outside and look in on
Bohemian life, you know," said Jack. "You've got to
be in it, else you don't know anything about it."

"But it seems to me," exclaimed Harold, "that all
Munich is of the artists, for the artists, by the artists."

"That's true," said Peter. "Why isn't it that way
anywhere at home?"

"How can it be?" said Harold. "The people don't
take art seriously— except immigrant Italians."

"No, over there it is nothing more than a decoration
of rich houses," said Jack.

"You're right," Harold responded. "Take my
mother, now — ^her house is supposed to be a stronghold
of art. Well, I dare say some of her artistic friends —
you know I never mixed much with them, Peter! —
well, I dare say some of them do care about art and
are connoisseurs, but they are connoisseurs of cock-
tails too, and care about them very decidedly. Art isn't

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a serious matter to them — ^you can't deny it. I confess,
I never thought of this before, until I came here to
Munich three days ago and talked with an art student
on the train. AH in all, Peter, though I believe your
things were all the rage at home, I don't blame you
for preferring Munich."

Peter thought of Harold's mother and laughed in his
heart.

"I told Peter it was the only place for him," said
Jack. "And he wouldn't believe me at first. It struck
me that he might as well be a sailor in the Alps as a
painter at home. But at last he saw it himself."

"Perhaps some day," said Harold, "we'll have our
great American art. We're not such rank materialists.
Think of our libraries and the respect we have for
books."

"Oh yes," said Peter. "But that's different. Now
my father lives and breathes among books, but I know
a painting — ^though he doesn't say so — ^is something
queer and frivolous to him. Why, our Pilgrim fathers
read books — ^but did they endure the sight of a pic-
ture ?"

"You're right," said Harold. "Well, we'll have to
wait for the great American artist to inspire the people.
Dear me, what serious conversation! I believe I
haven't had a talk with you, Peter, since my college
days ! Tell me about your good times !"

Till midnight the three lingered in the smoky room
and when they parted on the street, Harold said:

"I wish I were an artist of Bohemia and could have
all your jolly wild times. But tomorrow I'm off for
Vienna — ^worse luck! Friends of the Mater asked me

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to stay with them, awfully stiff, stupid people. Then
I go on to Greece. Well, it was good to see you
both."

"Good-by !^ said Peter. *'Who knows where we will
meet again !"

And Peter walked home, rejoicing that he did not
have to visit dull friends of Mrs. Montague's in Vienna,
and that he had his hard, absorbing work.

But he did not work too hard. For snowflakes were
dancing in the air and the Christmas spirit was hover-
ing over Munich. Peter had never seen such festive-
ness: forests of Christmas trees sprang up on the city
squares over night and filled the air with the scent of
hemlock ; booths with toylined streets that had been sober
before; and at every comer gilt pine-cones, icicles,
candles and a profusion of silver angels' hair were
offered to the passer-by with lusty cries. Mistletoe and
branches of evergreens seemed to have been strewn
over the city, as if for angels to walk on. This beckon-
ing of joy fromtevery street comer Peter could not and
did not want to resist. So on sunny aftemoons, when
snow was crackling underfoot, he would ride out into
the country with Cecile and Jack for jovial hours on
snowshoes or skees; or they would go skating on the
pond in the English Garden. C6cile always had to be
roused from her work. Pale with dark circles under
her eyes, but with iron persistence in her frail, model-
ing hands, she never seemed, to tire of her tasks, while
her cousin Vira would often come and lounge beside her
in a fantastic robe, smoking and making remarks on
Cecile's work.

"Or if you're too tired," Peter said on one of these

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invasions of her peace, "let us just meander through
the streets and look at the shops and booths/'

"What a Philistine amusement !" exclaimed Vira, who
was sitting at the window, draped in a flowing gown
of orange silk with a paper-covered French novel in
her lap. "In this Christmas season I keep out of the
streets. I find that my subtlest ideas are rubbed off by
the elbowing crowd."

Vira, called the "pseudo-Bohemian" by Peter's col-
leagues, had a luxurious studio on the ground floot of
the same house in which Peter's and Cecile's was at the
top, and spent her days conversing and imbibing atmos-
phere.

"When I stop work, I have no more subtle ideas,"
said C6cile, laying down her clay. "And Peter and I
wouldn't turn Philistine, even if we went to market and
brought hom.e potatoes."

Peter was not a little flattered that in spite of his
New England breeding, he should be considered a gen-
uine member of the esoteric Bohemian circle into which,
thanks to Jack Woodfin, he had slipped in a few
months. As he sauntered through the festive, buzzing
streets and the fragrant green squares with C6cile, it
seemed to him as if he had not really lived before he
came to Munich.

"A new kind of candle holder!" cried a peddler at
C6cile. "No danger of fire. Take it for your Christ-
mas tree, Madame !"

"Vira is going to St. Moritz for the holidays," said
C6cile. "We shall be alone on Christmas Eve. The
Dowager Empress, good soul, will want to see our tree,
and we want Jack too."

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They bought a little Christmas tree and silver
threads and glittering chains and balls and candles to
light on Christmas Eve, besides the cakes and fruits and
nuts for the feast. All thoughts of the homesick-
ness at Christmas time that he had secretly feared fled
in the festive turmoil, and he realized to his astonish-
ment that he had not looked forward so eagerly to the
holidays since he was a child. There was joy every-
where, and nothing in Peter's life to throw a shadow
on it ; for he had joy in his work, joy in the merry life
about him, joy in his colleagues and in C6cile who was
walking gaily at his side with her arms full of glittering
toys.

"I want to decorate the tree alone, though," she said.
"I want to surprise you and Jack, just as if you were
children."

Like a child, Peter looked forward to Christmas Eve,
and when, on the twenty-fourth of December, dusk be-
gan to sink into darkness and bells to toll, Peter laid
down his palette and opened his windows to let the
carols float in. From his high studio he could look far
over the city with its snow-covered roofs, glistening in
the veiled moonlight, and the shadowy towers and
steeples looming into the star-sprinkled sky. At home,
Christmas had hovered round the fireside, had lurked
in the comers of his father's house — ^here the whole city
was his house in holiday adornment, here every golden
window shining in the dark was lit for him, and to greet
him the bells were ringing their chimes. But, after all,
Peter did not have to throw himself into the welcoming
arms of the big city, for now he had a home within his
own four walls.

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"Merry Christmas!" C6cile called in her melodious
voice as she ran into the studio, her arms filled with
fragrant branches ; and Peter kissed her happily.

"Still working!" she said reproachfully. "Hurry and
put on your holiday clothes. And you mustn't look
behind there," she said pointing at a screen that stood
hiding one corner of the room. "That's a surprise !"

Half an hour later, the Dowager Empress or Mrs.
KroU arrived with a breezy air of festivity. A widow
for ten years with a solid, bourgeois past, she always
radiated matronly benevolence.

"Let me help you light the tree, daughter," she said
to C6cile glancing at the screen. "That's what I like
to do best of anything in the world."

"A Merry Christmas, friends!" Jack Woodfin's gruff
voice sounded from the stairs — a, voice so like his
father's that all at once there came to Peter's mind a
Christmas long ago, when he was a little boy and Jack's
father had come to him as Santa Qaus.

The Dowager Empress came out from behind the
screen and sat down at the piano. She had a silvery,
clear high voice, and to a gentle accompaniment, sang
the song that was being sung in hundreds of houses in
Munich in this very same moment :

"StiUe Nacht, heiUge Nacht-"

Meanwhile C6cile drew aside the screen, and the little
Christmas tree, abloom with many golden candle-
flowers, glistened in its tangled cobweb of silver threads.
The song and the sheen of the tree mingled with the
fragrance of the hemlock branches and brought a glow

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of joy to Cecile's pallid cheek and a sense of faultless
harmony to Peter's heart. Here he was in a foreign
land, far away from his home, and yet he felt as if he
were in this very moment in the bosom of a family. It
was not blood, but art, that held this family together,
and this tie was strong and dear.

When the last note of the last song had died down
and the last candle had been blown out, C6cile and Mrs.
Kroll spread out the feast that had been mysteriously
prepared, and from his height of silent ecstasy Peter
stepped down to earthly merry-making, yet always sub-
dued by a reverend sense of mystery, as if angels' wings
were rustling against the window-panes.

"If our fathers could see us here — !*' said Peter
under his breath to Jack.

"They would pity t;s poor devils," Jack replied.
"Especially yours would — ^and they couldn't guess that
we're ten times happier than mine in his hermitage and
yours in his snug home."

"Who is happier than who?" asked C6cile, flitting by
with a great copper bowl full of nuts.

"We are happier than our fathers," said Peter. "And
I'm happier tonight than anyone else in all Munich.
Are you?"
\ "Yes," said C6cile.

She glanced at the Christmas tree, and as if her eyes
reflected its silver glistening, they were illumined with
a serene joy.

"How beautiful it is, how restful!" said Cecile. "If
one could always have Christmas music and candle-light
and peace! But on New Year's Eve — ^so soon! — ^they
will make a wild night of it again, and we will have to

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be with them, of course. Then our lovely peace will be
blown away. So soon!"

She sighed lightly, but Peter laid his hand on her
arm.

"Even though we should be wild again/' he said, "we
shall never forget this peaceful night."

The next morning when Peter opened the Christmas
mail from his home, it seemed as if the jolly postman
with the icicles in his beard had brought it from some
remote stellar sphere. The letter from Virginia, too,
though it was written from Bozen, seemed an echo from
voices heard years ago.

"I hope you aren't very lonely at holiday time," Vir-
ginia had written, like Peter's mother. Lonely ! Never
before had he felt so little lonely, because so little mis-
understood. How could he, indeed, he misunderstood
on this island where all who understood one another
were severed from the cold, indifferent world!

The holidays passed swiftly in the solemnly adorned
churches, on the streets beneath festively illumined win-
dows, in the country on the glistening white roads by
frozen ponds and pine groves decked with snow.

And the eve of the old year sank down on twenty
hilarious artists in a separate room of the cafe where
they were wont to celebrate, among them C6cile in a
spangled gown with shining eyes and a feverish glow
on her cheeks, Peter at her side, Peter shouting and
singing more boisterously than the rest. They were all
sitting about a big round table in a cloud of smoke, and
the fiery liquid from the punch bowl in the middle
flowed freely and kindled flames in forty eyes.

"It is time to think of our sins," shrilly cried Vira,

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who was gorgeous in a scarlet robe cut perilously low
in the back, and long earrings of gold filigree that gave
her the look of an £g3rptian dancer. "I wonder who
has the most?'*

"I ! I !" shouted the revelers, and Peter shouted with
them.

"Well, Peter," exclaimed the Dowager Empress,
"why are you shouting too? You are the only white
one among all these black sheep. You haven't any
sins!"

"Oh, there's still time!" said Vira to console him,
and Peter silently emptied his glass, piqued by his repu-
tation.

The musicians outside of the esoteric room were play-
ing waltzes with a demoniac swiftness. Heller, with a
bacchanalian look in the small eyes that twinkled out of
his faun's face, rose and began to reel round the table in
ragged dance rh)rthm.

"Hallo, Heller!" said Jack. "How can you dance
when your Bacchante is at home?"

"Oh, my dear, sweet Bacchante!" wailed Heller, em-
bracing and kissing the air, as if he were holding his
precious statue in his arms.

The whole company burst out into gleeful laughter,
rose as of one accord, and turned its feasting into danc-
ing. The door was opened, so that the neighboring
music could flood the room, the rh)rthm of the waltzes
grew swifter and madder, the dancers whirled and
reeled, and those that were not dancing, silently emptied
the punch bowl.

All at once the music stopped and a solemnity
checked the dancing and laughing, for the city hall clock

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was striking twelve. The windows were opened to let
in festive sounds — ^the tolling of many bells, the scream-
ing of whistles and flourish of horns.

Peter and Cecile touched glasses gravely as if they
were performing a solemn rite, and Peter looked into
her big, wistful eyes.

**What will the new year bring you and me?** he asked
in a voice of awe, touched, as he was, by a mysterious
sense that the bells were tolling his f ate, which could not
stay happy always.

The old hungry, haunting look came into Chile's
ieyes as she shook her head and shrugged her shoulders.
And Peter felt that the New Year held in store for him
something dark, uprooting, baneful, and he gazed at
C6cile with strange foreboding.

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CHAPTER XII

THE VISION GROWS TAINTED

THE Carnival ball! Peter stood at the door to
watch and breathe a moment before plunging into
the whirlpool. The gaudy dancers swept by him,
uncanny with their masked faces, like shadows in bright
attire reeling through a dream. Here was a Carmen
with a rose at her ear; there a Black Forest peasant
girl ; a gypsy in gaudy rags ; a spangled Turk, a glitter-
ing fairy.

A Scotch highlander whirled past him so near that
he brushed against Peter's shoulder, and Peter knew
by the costume that it was Jack. In his arms danced
a frail sinuous apparition in a shimmering garment, sil-
very like the scales of a mermaid. Her shoulders and
languid arms were bare and dazzling like white sand
lapped by glistening waves, her black hair was twisted
in a coil. He knew the curve of her neck, the droop of
her shoulders, the languorous lines of her arms. She
turned — ^her luminous eyes were shining like gems in
the black setting of her mask. It was C6cile.

A pang of remorse made Peter linger alone in the
midst of the wild Carnival ball. Cecile! Though he
dared on this maddest of nights to snatch any of the
glittering dancers but of the arms of their cavaliers

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without ceremony, like a tiger snatching his prey, he
dared not come near Cecile. It was all over between
her and Peter since one ugly day when poor Cecile,
deadly pale with bloodless lips, had discovered his faith-
lessness, and an hour later had taken flight to Vira's cold
establishment from their own cheerful studio home. All
over!

It was that model Fedora who had begun it all, who,
while C6cile had been away at the Zoo modeling a lion,
had posed for him day after day, laughing her sly
demoniac laugh in front of a mirror, with a spangled
scarf thrown over her bare white shoulders and her
strange copper-golden hair sliding down to her neck.
Fedora had begun it with her diabolical laugh, and then,
when he had lost Cecile. ... As the gaudy dancers
spun by him, so the train of Peter's mates in sin were
reeling past his mind, stretching out their languish-
ing arms to him, flashing passionate glances, grinning
with evil distorted lips. What was the value of this
vile, glittering train when Cecile was lost — Cecile,
the best woman in Munich — Cecile who would not
even look his way while she was dancing with the
compassionate Jade in her mad, furious dance of
despair !

Like a flame suddenly shooting up in the night, which
lights a part of the landscape with uncanny clearness
and leaves the rest in darkness, so the last bitter scene
with C6cile was gruesomely present and distinct in
Peter's mind. Cecile had been called to Russia to
attend the marriage of a brother and had returned
sooner than he had expected. It was at six o'clock in
the morning that she had waited for him after a whole

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night's vigil, white and feverish with long-suppressed
rage.

"With whom have you been?" she had gasped, with
no other greeting.

There had been something commanding, something
like steel in the light of her eyes that forbade untruths.
So, though he had felt with horrible foreboding that he
was risking the loss of his dearest friend, he had
answered sullenly:

"With Fedora."

"That painted devil 1" C6cile had shrieked. "That
scum "

Then she had bitten her lip and frowned sternly and
had walked into the other room, where she began to
pack her trunk in feverish haste. He had tried to keep
her back with vows that his real love belonged to her,
with reminders of their happy months together, with
entreaties and promises — ^but in vain.

"I felt it coming before I went away," she had said
shuddering. "Ever since that day I came home from
the Zoo . . . I'm glad I went away now — ^it has made
everything clear between us."

He had tried to take her hand, but she had drawn
hers away, shrinking from his touch . . . How clearly
he saw it all again : her deathly face, her twitching arm,
the packed trunk that had made this nightmare so real
. . . how present that gloomy scene was here in the thick
of romping and revelry!

Remorse choked him ; but it was too late ! If he had
lost Cecile and with her peace and a tranquil mind for
work, he would plunge headlong over the downward
path, for every new wild adventure left a brilliant vigor-

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ous reflection on his canvas. If passion inflamed his
art — ^why then on, on into the flames !

A luxurious creature in a fantastic Persian or Turkish
costume happened to catch his eye because of the broad
scarlet sash round her waist, perhaps, or because she was
dancing with savage abandon.

Like a tiger Peter snatched the sumptuous Persian
and whirled away with her.

"Who are you ?" asked Peter in the heat of the dance.

"Call me what you will," answered his partner in a
rich, seductive voice. "Cleopatra — Kundri — ^Undine —
Circe— call me Eve, call me Salome "

"Salome — ^that's what you areT' exclaimed Peter.
"The arch-temptress!"

Salome rested her head listlessly on Peter's shoulder,
and he kissed her white neck.

"I am afraid of you, you wild matador!" cried the
temptress and laughed gaily.

When they stopped a moment in the whirl to breathe,
a little Japanese doll of a lady came tripping up to
Peter.

"Why don't you dance with me?" she chirped.

"Why, I will with joy !" said Peter. "Come, Madame
Chrysanthem . . . The next one-step with you,
Salome!" he called back to his first partner, as he
danced off with the little Japanese.

"You won't find me when you want me!" Salome
flung after him sharply. "I won't dance to your tune !"

Peter heard her clanging laughter above the air of
the waltz, but a minute later she was pirouetting near
him with a sprightly Pierrot.

The bird-like Japanese bored Peter, so, when the

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music paused, he dropped her into the arms of a Spanish
knight and rushefl off in pursuit of a fluttering deep
blue veil that had beguiled his eye. The owner of the
blue veil was snatched from him after a few swift
rounds when the fiery, diabolical waltz was at its
height. So Peter, greedy for every moment of revelry,
hunted his glittering wild game, plunging from one
dancer to another, on — on— deliriously, drunkenly,
savagely. ...

One, two, three — ^tra, la, la . . . If life were a waltz,
what horror if the music should stop ! Death and ashes
without madcap rhythm and dance! One must dance
on forever to flee death ....

In the midst of this frenzy, he noticed one guest at
the ball who did not dance with his partner and Peter
wondered who this odd stranger might be. Madman 1
Aloof and serene, in a noble Greek robe, he was walk-
ing up and down as if he were watching children at play.
Plato that was — in every gesture the calm and haughty
man of thought. Who could the masked lady be that
was walking up and down at Plato's side, in the garb of
a Greek maiden with a gold fillet in her dark hair and
a wreath round her waist? Poor soul, poor love of
Plato, doomed to walk in meditation when Carnival was
raging round about !

"The next dance is the midnight dance!" whispered
Salome who was in Peter's arms again.

"Then I can kiss you on your lips when that ugly
mask drops off," said Peter.

"No, to punish you I sha'n't dance the midnight dance
with you," she said in her rich voice. "You left me for
that Japanese!"

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The music stopped and Salome fled out of Peter's
reach.

Annoyed, Peter looked about in search of a worthy
partner for the riotous dance at the end of which all
masks would drop at the stroke of midnight. The Greek
maiden was still walking serenely at Plato's side, wind-
ing her way through the revelers, like a steady ship
sailing through a stormy sea. As there might be some
novel amusement in waking this nymph out of her calm,
Peter rushed directly to the timid Greek maiden.

"Arethusa, I am your slave!" he cried, seizing her
hand. "Save me from despair and let me have this mid-
night dance."

The Greek maiden recoiled, frightened, but in the
next moment bowed her head in silent consent and, as
the music now began again with special vim and fire,
she danced with light, nymph-like steps.

"Are you a follower of Plato?" asked Peter in Ger-
man, but she made no reply, and kept her eyes down-
cast. He repeated his question in English, but she
remained silent. He tried French, and she was silent
still. Whatever her language might be, she seemed a
lithe nymph in his arms and he did not care whence she
had flown. Perhaps, when she dropped her mask, she
would reveal a face of classic Greek beauty? Peter
began to be jealous of that Plato who stood watching
him dance off with his maiden.

Two minutes of twelve! One — ^two — three! One,
two, three, on and on . . . The music stopped. Silence-
then a bacchanalian roar.

Peter tore off his mask.

''You must too!" he cried to the reluctant maiden.

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"That IS the rule of the game. If you are Helen of
Troy herself, you can't hide your beauty a moment
longer."

The silent nymph slowly raised her hand to her mask,
lingered before tearing it off, as if she were afraid of
something mysterious, then made one more effort . . *

"Virginia r

Was she an apparition in his fever? Was he mad?

"Virginia, is it really you ?" he asked wildly.

"Yes," she broke her long silence meekly. "It is
really I."

"But how did you ever — ^what made you come to thisf
wild place? And how did you know me?"

"By your voice — ^that's simple," said Virginia bitterly.
"And I came here with Mr. Atherton — ^Plato."

"Atherton here!" exclaimed Peter.

And to be sure, at the other end of the hall stood the
philosopher, now unmasked, gazing serenely on the
rioting multitude.

"Why didn't you write me you were coming to Mu-
nich?" asked Peter, confused.

"Because you owe me a letter for ever so long," said
[Virginia with an injured note in her voice.

"I know it," said Peter ruefully. "But— but— how
happy I am you are here! You can't imagine . . . . "

Indeed, how could Virginia understand the full mean-
ing of his strange, sudden joy at seeing her? It was
as if a sea-wind had blown into the hot, perfumed air
of the dance-hall.

"There are many things I had never imagined before,"
said Virginia pointedly. "I never guessed people could
be so gay."

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Of course she had been watching his wildness all the
time, while pacing up and down at Plato's side !

^*What made you come at all ?" he asked, mortified.

"I wanted to see real artists' life," said Virginia. "So
I begged Mr. Atherton to take me along. Do you
always kiss the ladies you dance with?" she asked sud-
denly, with a bewildered glance.

"No, that IS only a fashion of Carnival," Peter
answered quickly.

"Oh, I'm not so provincial," said Virginia with a
forced laugh and a toss of her head. "You needn't
think I'm shocked."

"But I know you are," said Peter. "I can read it in
your eyes."

Never had Virginia looked so beautiful as in the
noble white robe with the gold fillet in her hair, never
had she seemed to Peter so youthful as in her bewilder-
ment here in the midst of the reeling, laughing and
shrieking horde. Peter's own youth seemed to be call-
ing him away, back to a dewy fragrant garden.

They went to meet Atherton, who though unmasked,
was still the serene Plato aloof from the unbridled mor-
tals among whom he was walking, and Peter shook hands
heartily with the philosopher.

"You seem to be in your element," said Atherton,
not without a tinge of mockery, after his first cordial
greeting.

"It must all seem very foolish to you," said Peter.
''No doubt, Carnival is an absurd time. But now it is
all over; Ash Wednesday has struck. I wonder how
you came to know about this ball — ^and how long have
you been here an)nvay?"

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"Two days," said Atherton. "I knocked at your
studio door yesterday, but no one opened it. Then, on
the stairs, I met Mr. Woodfin who recognized me and
told me that in Carnival time you were not to be found
in your studio, but that you would surely be here to-
night."

"And Mr. Atherton is staying at the same hotel as
Aunt Clarissa and I," said Virginia. "And when he
told me about this ball, I begged him to take me too."

"Aunt Clarissa!" Peter exclaimed. "I thought she
was in her garden."

"Oh, do you still remember the garden?" cried Vir-
ginia. "I thought you had forgotten things at home.
We must go — it is late," she said nervously, startled by
a sudden roar of laughter from a group behind her.

"If you have seen enough," said Atherton, a little
bored, "I am ready to go at any time. Only one word,
Peter, about your painting. How is that going?"

"You must come to my studio tomorrow and judge
for yourself," said Peter gladly, eager to impress Ather-
ton with his prolific and inspired work. "And you, too,
Virginia, must come and see if I have gained any
panache/'

"I'm sure you have that now," said Virginia with a
light laugh. "Good night, Peter!"

"Oh, no," said Peter. "I'm going to walk home with
you both, if I may."

"But you don't want to^leave the ball yet?" said Vir-
ginia astonished, though pleasure kindled in her eyes.

Peter gave a short laugh and shrugged his shoulders.
For a moment he stood watching the revelers: what
were these creatures reeling past him, these wild,

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fantastic men with the sparkle of wine in their eyes,
these women whose bare white arms seemed hun-
dreds of lassos thrown out to ensnare? Where was he —
was it all a nightmare? Anyway, it was over; he
had waked up out of his wild dream, and he was going
out into the clear moonlit night with Atherton and
Virginia.

As Peter was leading Virginia to the door, a pale
woman wrapped in glistening sinuous folds stood fixed,
staring at him with a deep, wounded look: it was
Cecile. Poor C&ilel Suffering, toiling C6cilel Why
had she not broken the spell of his savage frivolity, why
had he not gone back to his patient and heroic mate,
instead of waiting for Virginia in her innocence and
ignorance of toil and pain! There was injustice in all
this, but it seemed to have been ordained ; so he avoided
Cecile's glance and led Virginia away.

On the street Virginia, no longer bewildered by the
heat and revelry of the ballroom, now talked more
easily and cheerfully, and Atherton seemed to lay his
calm on the boisterousness of the night. The phil-
osopher told Peter that he had come to Munich from
Oxford to use the University library, and that after two
or three weeks he would make a leisurely journey
through Italy.

"I wish you would stay here longer," said Peter hon-
estly, eager for the companionship of a tranquil mind
in his restless life.

As for Virginia — he could could not conceive of her
living in Munich where he had been embracing the
frivolous adventures that set afire his art. It would
have to be Virginia or all the rest, for what had

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^ ===

wounded even Cecile, the long-suflfering and disUlu-
sioned, would terrify Virginia.

"We have to leave the day after tomorrow/' Vir-
ginia's voice broke innocently into Peter's thoughts. "We
can't leave mother alone so long in Bozen ; we only came
here for a little distraction."

That was a simple way out of Peter's dilemma, but it
was too simple: he would have liked to see Virginia
longer ! And, after all, the spell of his reckless life had
been shattered when the Greek maiden of Carnival had
droppd her mask ; he could not go back to it any more.

"Can't you change your mind and stay longer?'* he
said. "But any way, you must come to my studio to-
morrow. I will call for you all — ^you and Mr. Atherton
and Miss Clarissa."

For Peter remembered in time that he was back in a
world of etiquette and chaperones. He bade Virginia
and Atherton good night at the hotel steps and walked
home alone through the noisy streets. Back in his
chilly studio, he fell into a deep sleep and dreamed that
he was at home painting with Mr. Woodfin in the snowy
woods, and when he awoke at ten o'clock it was hard
for him to grasp where he might be.

"I'll go right away to see Virginia," he said to him-
self, as if he were going to stroll down the lane to Miss .
Clarissa's garden.

When he called at the hotel where Virginia was stay-
ing with her aunt, he met the quaint white-haired lady
in the lobby.

"Why, Peter!" she exclaimed. "How good it is to
see a face from home !"

Peter had not conversed with an old woman since he

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had left GuUport where the old and quaint seemed to
have outnumbered the youthful, and a warmth as from
a sheltered fireside radiated from Miss Clarissa. In a
quiet comer they talked about Virginia's mother at
Bozen and about their common friends at home and
about the buds that would soon shoot up in the garden
when spring would come again. At last Virginia joined
them, sprightly and at ease after she had slept away
her confusion of last night

"Now I know you again," she said laughing merrily.

"You knew me before I took my mask oflf," Peter
replied.

"You must have had a very gay party last night," said
Miss Clarissa pleasantly, whereupon Virginia whispered
to Peter:

"I haven't given Aunt many details."

As none of them had breakfasted yet, although the
forenoon was half over, they sat down in a sunny break-
fast-room and had a cheerful meal with talk of home,
and Peter felt as if he had returned from wandering a
long while in an odd, fantastic land. Only when Miss
Clarissa asked him about his work and his life in
Munich, he found it hard to answer her, for in Virginia's
dark eyes there kindled a gleam of suspicion.

"Your mother was always afraid you might be grow-
ing too wild and Bohemian!" said the old lady. "But
I can tell her that you seem quite respectable. She
always found comfort, anyway, in the thought that
Jack Woodfin was with you so much — ^he is someone
from home, at least."

Peter thought of Jack who had, no doubt, escorted
Cecile after the ball and consoled her in her righteous

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grief and jealousy. He hoped that C^cile would not
chance to come out of Vira's studio on the ground floor
when he was leading Virginia up the high stairs to his
own studio that once had been Cecile's too.

Virginia in his studio! She would forgive him the
wildness that she had watched on Carnival night, she
would forgive him his Bohemian life when she should
see the good fruit of his adventures. Why, she had not
seen any of his work since he had painted under the
regime of Mrs. Montague! Anticipating Virginia's
admiring surprise, Peter laughed and talked merrily
with her all the way to the studio, while Atherton fol-
lowed with Miss Clarissa.

"The stairs are very steep," said Peter apologetically.
**I only hope you'll find the climb worth while."

With a thrill of pride Peter opened the studio door.

"How very genuine-looking and artistic!" exclaimed
Miss Qarissa. "A true studio !"

"What a jolly place !" cried Virginia. "I never thought
a man could make such an inspired home — ^it looks as if
a woman had helped to arrange it."

Thereupon Peter avoided Virginia's glance and
thought gratefully of Vira's studio below, where no door
had opened in the inopportune moment.

"And now for the pictures!" cried Virginia eagerly.

With pride and joy Peter went to the collection of
canvases that he had set up this morning with the
painted sides against the wall. What would Virginia
say . . . . ?

First he showed the "Dancing Gypsy," which had
not yet been taken by the buyer, then the portrait of the
laughing Heller with his Bacchante, then "Fedora Be-

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fore the Mirror/' the most sparkling of all, then his
fantastic "Lilith," the white-skinned, golden-haired
woman with the great black and green shining serpent
coiling round her waist and limbs, then "Behind the
Scenes" with its sprightly interplay of varied lights, the
spangled skirts of the dancers and the gay saucy faces,
and the other pictures that he had painted during the last
weeks of artistic fury.

Peter set the paintings up side by side along the wall,
like a little gallery, and watched his three visitors con-
template his work — or rather, watched Virginia. She
was looking from one to the other with a strangely
blank face. The silence was growing oppressive.

It was Atherton who saved the situation from pain-
ful awkwardness.

"You have quite a new style now," he said. "You
have improved amazingly."

At last! These words were a relief to Peter,
especially as they sounded quite honest.

"It is all very brilliant work," said Miss Qarissa
timidly, "but to an old-fashioned thing like me these
pictures all seem rather foreign. No doubt, if I were
younger, I should be able to appreciate them much bet-
ter .... "

"They are not what we are used to in New England,"
said Atherton to the old lady. But Virginia remained
silent.

When Atherton had shrewdly called Miss Clarissa to
the window to show the fine bird's-eye view of Munich
and there engaged her in conversation, Peter could not
refrain from asking Virginia:

"Do you still miss the panache in my work?"

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"No, there is panache enough and to spare/' Vir-
ginia answered without looking at him. "But . . . . "

"But what?" Peter challenged.

Virginia turned round and met his eyes with a deep,
horrified glance.

''There is something tainted about all these/' she
said in a voice that was something between a cry and a
whisper. "Peter, what kind of lite have you been
leading?"

For this outbreak Peter was not prepared. Tainted —
tainted ! The hideous word rang in his ears as he stood
immobile and silent.

"Peter!" Virginia looked at him once more with
great glowing eyes. "Where is your vision?"

At first Peter was stunned as if he had been struck,
then a vision flashed before his inward eyes : a sea of
scarlet poppies was flaming and in the midst a child
with radiant golden curls stood laughing in the shower
of sunlight. Red poppies! For one blessed moment
only the poppies glowed in their pure, joyous red — ^then
impure, purplish tints crept into the color of the petals
and lingered there, though he tried with desperate
effort to keep them away.

"It's the vision!" cried Peter. "It's the vision that
lias grown tainted."

It was all over! His work, done in the frenzy that
followed wild pleasures, was all a failure: he had been
faithless to his vision. Virg^a's eyes were glistening
ivith tears.

"Won't you show us your sketches now?" chirped
Miss Clarissa and Peter, like someone calling through a
haze to people whom he could not see, talked to his

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guests and showed them his sketches, though he did
not know what they and he himself were saying. Only
when they began to say good-by, he woke out of his
trance and offered to escort them home.

Peter walked with Miss Clarissa to avoid forced con-
versation with Virginia, and he was glad when he found
himself alone with Maurice Atherton, with whom he
had planned to take a walk.

"Well, Peter," said Atherton, "your work is alive at
last — no longer a drawing-room decoration."

Peter shrugged his shoulders: no praise, not even
Atherton's, could heal the wound Virginia had in-
flicted.

"To be sure,'* Atherton continued. "Though the
technique is admirable, there is still something about
your work that keeps it from being great art — 3, certain
frivolity, perhaps — "

"Oh, how I envy you !" Peter interrupted him with a
loud sigh.

"Envy me?" repeated Atherton in his light accent.
"For what, I wonder?"

"'Give me the man that is not passion's slave!'"
Peter cried out with a sigh.

"Oh, but I trust you are not really enslaved, Peter,"
said the philosopher with the faint ironic curl of his
lips. "I understand that it was to escape certain deli-
cate chains at home that you fled to Boheme."

"That is It !" sighed Peter. "I fled from one slavery
into another. Boheme! Where is the freedom there? I
supposed that I was free as a bird, and I see now that
too much freedom is the fastest chain of all. It isn't
I myself that is fettered — ^what do I care what becomes

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of myself? It is my art that is maimed — ^tainted with
a false joy . . . tainted . . . ."

Bitterly the last word lingered on Peter's tongue ; but
Atherton smiled.

"If there is nothing to hold you here," he said, "fly
away !"

They had turned into the English Garden, where the
frozen snow was sparkling.

"You are right; I ought to leave," said Peter. "I
am weary of it all. I belong neither here nor there."

"I will tell you where you belong," said Atherton
serenely.

"Oh where?" cried Peter. "Anywhere on this
earth?"

"You belong to yourself," said the philosopher.
"You owe your art the solitude that every great artist
needs."

"Solitude?" exclaimed Peter, mysteriously drawn to
this new idea. "I am not at all used to being alone. I
have made short journeys by myself, of course — ^but
you mean that I should live all alone somewhere like a
hermit?"

"You need not live in a hermit's hut, nor wear a
hair-shirt," said Atherton . "But merely tear oflf all the
frail tentacles that coil round you when you move in a
community."

"Solitude — *^ mused Peter. "There is s<Mnething allur-
ing about that . . . But the idea of working for months
all alone that seems a little uncanny."

"Well, let me oflfer a compromise," said his com-
panion. "I shall have finished my work here in a week,
and I was planning to go on a leisurely stroll through

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Italy and in spring up again to the Italian lakes, and
in summer perhaps back to Bavaria. Don't you want
to join me? You would practically have your solitude,
for I have work enough for myself and I should beg
you to ignore my existence— only when you are in a
mood to break your silence, now and then, I shall be
glad of a little talk."

"Oh, that's a wonderful plan!" cried Peter with boy-
ish ardor.

He saw himself the follower of this serene spirit who
walked aloof from and forever smiling down on the
passions and struggles of commoners like Peter him-
self, and he already felt ennobled by the scholar's mere
invitation.

"Are we agreed?" asked Atherton. "I should like to
leave in about ten days, if that suits you."

"Oh, yes," said Peter eagerly. "That will give
me time to pack up my pictures and send them to the
jury for the spring exhibition, and to break up
here. ... I am going with you! What a wonderful
Ufe that will be!"

During the rest of their walk, Atherton laid out the
plans for his journey and to Peter it seemed as if his
companion were unrolling a miraculous scroll. To think
of wandering through Italy for the first time beside a
philosopher and calm lover of beauty ! Other joys, the
mirth and revels of Boheme, seemed coarse beside these
esoteric delights and Peter felt strangely light-hearted, as
if he were turning into a rarer and more ethereal sub-
stance.

Relcutantly Peter left Atherton and went back to his
studio where, on the threshold, he saw Jack Woodfin.

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"There you are !" exclaimed Jack. "I was just going
away again."

He followed Peter into the studio and they sat dowa
opposite each other, Jack lighting his pipe and Peter a
cigarette.

"I've been to see C^cile," he said gruffly. "And
thought I'd come up and see how you were getting
on.

Peter's and Jack's good-fellowship had been a little
strained since the rupture with Cecile.

"I'm going away, Jack," he broke a lengthy silence^
"Soon. I'm going to Italy for a few months."

"Why, man ?" asked Jack astonished.

"I need a change," Peter replied.

"Your health seems good enough," said Jack in-
credulously.

"Oh, my health is all right," said Peter. "But my
work needs a change — ^new surroundings, new influ-
ence — new anything ! I'm going with Atherton."

"Well, I wish you joy !" said Jack.

When Peter told him that he would break up hrs
studio and that he was not at all sure if he were ever
coming back to Munich to live, Jack stared at him as if
Peter were moon-struck.

"It's too bad you are going away, old boy," said Jack,
rising and slapping Peter on the shoulder. "If it weren't
you, I should say you were a fool — ^but I suppose you
have your reasons."

"I have," said Peter and then asked Jack's advice
about the sending away of his pictures to the spring
exhibition and talked professional gossip until they
shook hands at the door.

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"It's too bad you arc going away, old man," said Jack
again.

"I've had a first-rate winter, I'm sure of that," said
Peter. "But it's over now."

When Jack Woodfin's heavy footsteps on the stairs
were out of hearing, Peter k>oked round in his cheer-
ful studio at the sketches on the wall, at the divan where
Cecile had often lounged, at the easle, the palette and
brushes in disorder, at the candle-sticks and ash-trays
and the flask of Chartreuse that reminded him of gaie-
ties now at an end. After all, it was with a heavy heart
that he left the enchanted island of Boheme to migrate
toward a rarer clime. But now there must be no turn-
ing back !

Should he go downstairs now to Vira's studio and say
good-by to Cecile whom he would never see again?
Should he beg her forgiveness and ask her to remember
him kindly and assure her that she had been his good
genius on this island of Boheme from which he was go-
ing to sail away forever? No, he would wait till the
day before his departure, lest C6cile's old spell should
make him waver — and he must not now turn back to
Cecile who knew nothing of his vision and the bond
made in Aunt Qarissa's garden. So instead, although
he had left her only two hours ago, Peter went to see
Virginia and to tell her that he was once more going to
bum his ships behind him and follow her philosopher
into a land of contemplation where his vision should lose
its taint.

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CHAPTER XIII

THE VISION HAS FLED

OLIVE-GREEN shadows from the low mountains
over the lake with its lazy boats, a sky of deep,
calm blue, a black grove of stone-pine and cypress trees
and flat-roofed white houses that seemed to have grown
out of the dark mountain-side — ^these beauties Peter was
copying on a small canvas, sitting on a stone at the lake-
side in the little village Perlozza. The strong Italian sun-
beams were stinging him and, as haste was unnecessary,
he laid down his brushes and palette and stretched him-
self out in the bright green grass by the roadside.

"II dolce far menteT he murmured to himself as he
shaded his eyes with his straw hat and bliidced drowsily
at the cloudless sky.

As he lay thus without a care in the wide, sunny
worid, the last few months of his life floated by him in
airy pictures for the eye of his memory. His good-by
to Cedle — how far away it seemed now, like a scene
that happened to somecme else long ago! Her tearless
eyes had started as if they were frozen at the sight of
him, her laughter, once low and melodious, had rung
out wild and clanging when she had cried out bitterly :
"We shall never meet again!" The harshness of that
moment was mellowed by the haze of distance ; the echo

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of her strident laugh had died away in the balmy, tran-
quil air. It seemed as if he must have eaten of the lotos
fruit that brings sweet oblivion and desire for nothing
but

In the hollow lotos land
To live and lie reclined.

The moment — ^much less hazy in Peter's mind! — ^now
came to him in which Maurice Atherton had stood still
by the Amo had said :

"Here Dante saw Beatrice for the first time; she was
nine years old and wore a scarlet dress."

And these few simple words of his companion had
made the Italian poet and his blessed lady spring up
out of the hallowed ground with a glory about them,
and had made Peter feel as if he himself, like the me-
diaeval seer led by Virgil along the dwellings of the
dead, were being led by his rare companion through the
luxuriant fields of the past.

The picture in Florence! How he had seemed to
tread on feathery clouds, breathing the rarest air and
bathing his forehead in star-beams! There had been
no one to wake him out of his contemplation, no one
to call him rudely down from the clouds, and his com-
panion had been beckoning onward always, holding a
key in his hand that unlocked chambers of history.

Easter at Rome and the grand procession to St.
Peter's — what a fragrance of incense and lilies, what an
unearthly pageant, what a sonorous organ-like "Te
Deum" had overwhelmed Peter's eyes and ears! And
Atherton had stood by, smiling at all the glorious
beauty as if it had been a work of art for his delight.

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He had smiled in the same way in Pompeii at the
golden-brown walls and pillars of the dead city against
the live blue sky, at Vesuvius and the gleaming bay.
So he had smiled at this very lake with the olive
shadows, at the red geranium in the window of that vil-
lage house across the road. Atherton's smile seemed
to Peter, philosophy's sanction of beauty.

Beauty! How could Peter have supposed that he
had looked on beauty's face before he had set foot on
Italy! Reflections of it, no doubt, had beguiled him
all his life, but now the artist's bride was unveiled.

Peter breathed a deep sigh of content as he lay on
the grass and thrust his hands into his pockets. What
was that letter in his pocket — some old one — ^that he
had forgotten to take out? Oh, it was a scrawl from
Jack Woodfin telling Peter that his "Laughing Woman
with Mirror," which had been exhibited together with
Heller's portrait, had now been sold. Peter had been
pleased enough when that news came, but now he was
quite indifferent, for the lake was not a bit more lucid
or the sky more blue because two pictures of his hung
in a gallery in gray Munich and one of them would be
hanging in some bourgeois parlor! To be sure, the
sale of the picture was helping him to continue his care-
free life without concern for the near future, and there
was something in that.

A small boat was ruffling the glassy water near the
shore, rowed by a handsome brown boy with bare
bronze arms and thick black curls, and a calm figure
was sitting idly at the stem. The figure was Atherton
who landed at the pier, tipped the boy and strolled
toward Peter with a book in his hand.

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"Don't get up," he said to Peter. "Go on contem-
plating while I take a little walk/'

"Oh, I wasn't contemplating at all,*' said Peter. "I
am too content to want to think at all."

"Don't throw away your birthright!" Atherton said
in a tone of mock-warning.

"What birthright?" asked Peter.

"That of contemplation," said Atherton. ''AH other
pleasures pall."

"All pleasures?" mused Peter, as he packed his tools
together.

"Yes, all pleasures," said Atherton. "Even love."

"I would not have let you say that three months ago
in Munich," said Peter gaily. "Surely not in Carnival
time."

"You were happy in your cups then," returned the
philosopher. "And you said with our friend Omar:

" You know, my friends, with what a brave carouse
I made a second marriage in my house,
Divorced old barren Reason from my bed
And took the daughter of the vine to spouse.

"And you see, I have had pity on your divorced spouse
and made her my bride."

"I'm afraid she was never really mine," laughed
Peter. "But let me have a little intercourse with her
now. Or do you think a simple painter has nothing to
do with Reason?"

They were walking on the broad road now, along the
lake.

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"On the contrary," answered Atherton. "Quite on
the contrary. It is Wisdom that telk you:

" PaintI for you know not whence you came, nor why:
Paint! for you know not why you go, nor where."

"For, Peter, you must understand that the grape may
turn bitter in your mouth and your ignorance of whence
you came and where you go will be small solace then;
but of the world that you paint at the dictate of Wisdom
you know the whence and the where and the why. You
are monarch over that world; there is no bitterness in
it and no death."

Peter listened reverently to his master, while they
were turning into the village and strolling along the
main street. The drowsy spell of noon lay over the low
white houses, though there still were women and chil-
dren on the doorsteps, eating fruits and talking in their
melodious tongue. A group of idle men was clustering
round a pump where a beautiful black-haired woman
with strong arms bare to the shoulder and a sun-
browned neck was fillings her jug. A little barefoot boy
with dust on his brown chubby face pulled Peter by the
sleeve and begged for a centesimo. From an open win-
dow the broken air of a folksong came floating down.

"It is easy enough to build up this world of beauty
that you recommend," remarked Peter, "while one is
standing with both feet in Italy."

"Oh, you can build it up anywhere," returned Ather-
ton. "If you shut your eyes to all that is ugly. And,
moreover, nothing is ugly if you look at it in a frame,
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to build your new world. Look at this ragamuffin!"
he went on, pointing at the little boy: "here a dirty,
tormenting urchin — ^there a picturesque cherub! The
wash on the clothesline between those houses: here
family linen — ^there white flags on an azure field! As
Goethe says:

"Am farbigen Abglanz haben wir das Leben."

"Since I have been with you," said Peter. "It has
seemed as if philosophers and artists formed a nobility
and all the rest of mankind were the common horde."

"So it is," Atherton replied. "We leave the vulgar
with their passions behind and wander in our Elysian
fields which are not nebulous dream lands at all, but
orderly states governed by wisdom, even though they be
adorned by fancy."

Peter thought of all whom he had left behind on his
journey to these Elysian fields — his father and mother,
all his friends at home and even some of his colleagues
in Munich whose eyes were fixed too long on earth.
But he was not lonely.

In the garden of the little inn the two strollers
stopped and ate a rustic meal and drank the ruby-red
Chianti, for it was their wont to visit the by-ways and
simple nooks on their journey. The noon sunrays were
piercing and there was no breeze.

"It is about time to go north," said Atherton, wiping his
brow.

"I hate to leave the lakes, though," sighed Peter, "now
I have grown so used to cypress and poplar trees and
cloudless skies — ^how shall I learn to mix grays again?"

"Oh, there are subtler landscapes in store for you," said

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his companion. "I shouldn't think of forcing Switzer-
land on you. I don't want you to paint panoramas, and if
you want intimate nooks, you don't need Mont Blanc
for a background. But let me show you the Black Forest !
You see, Peter, your landscape here by Lake Lugano, like
all the Italian landscapes, is finite: the placid lake, the
mountains with serene curves, the fan-shaped stone-
pines, the low, flat-roofed houses, all seem inclosed in a
ring, content in themselves, like a Greek temple or a per-
fect sonnet. But in the Black Forest you will find white
films of mist blurring the outlines of shadowy woods,
pines and hemlocks aspiring blindly to the sky, church
steeples, Gothic, mystic abandon."

"Take me there! cried Peter. "Let me paint mists
and elusive woods. Perhaps, after all, I have had enough
strong sunlight and sharp shadows. And even if there
should be sunshine in the Black Forest, the beauty of the
landscape there will be less perfect — less "

"Less ripe," finished Atherton. "Less like a mellow
fruit dropping into your lap. There will be more to grope
for — ^to guess at . . . Suppose we start tomorrow?"

Peter consented. As long as his modest funds held out,
there was no reason why this exquisite life of leisurely
sketching, discourse and meditation should cease. There
was time enough in chill autumn to go back to his noisy
colleagues in Munich or to drudgery at home. In these
days Peter did not like to look beyond the morrow, nor
even to avert his gaze from the timeless beauty of the
hour. There was time enough!

So Peter and his master lingered over their Qiianti to
plan out their journey northward to the Titisee in the
Black Forest, while the maid, a buxom, black-eyed peas-

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ant, watched tiie two strangers keenly, especially die
charming gentleman with the dark moustache, who did not
pay the tribute of a single glance to her beauty. When
they had risen at last, they sauntered languidly to the boat-
landing and took the steamer across the lake to Paradiso,
where they had their lodgings. Peter looked into the
dear green-gray water and up at the gende slopes of the
mountains, with their gray barren stretches and their
woods of olive green. With a parting pang he gazed back
at the tow, flat-roofed houses on the mountain sides,
white houses widi red geraniums at the windows, and at
die single cypress trees silhouetted in all their finished
beauty, as if by design.

"Lugano^Paradiso !" sighed Peter, as if all the beauty
of the lake were captured in those two names.

'Tomorrow night we shall be sailing across Lake Lu-
cerne," said Atherton. "No more olive shadows then."

'1 think I caught them in my sketch diis morning," said
Peter, "but it will have to stay unfinished."

Indeed, Peter's Italian sketches were almost all unfin-
ished, colored moods thrown on to canvas without ambi-
tion. Perhaps, in a more northern climate, he would find
energy again to make a complete picture. Here in Italy
the spirit of "U dolce far nienie'' had toudied him even'
in his art.

The next day Peter and Atherton passed through the
St. Gotthard, and the night they spent in Lucerne, oooled
by Alpine breezes and the freshness of the lake. And the
following day they journeyed northward to the Titisee in
the Black Forest. After they had left the Jura Mountains
and entered Baden, the sky grew more and more cloudy,

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and when they reached Freiburg, veils of mist hung on
the mountains. From the train window Peter saw the
beautiful cathedral spire, delicate like lacework of stone,
rise into the gray sky high above the gabled houses ; he
saw the blurred outlines of the black forests on the moun-
tains round the town, and mist that seemed, like incense,
to rise upward from the ground in something of an ec-
clesiastical mystery.

"You are right," said Peter to his companion, "this is
Gothic and mystic — and there is a more elusive beauty
here than in Lugano."

"You must shut your Renaissance eyes," said Ather-
ton, "and dream of the Middle Ages."

"Whether Renaissance or the Dark Ages," Peter re-
plied, "that makes no difference to me. I only see what I
see and know that it is beautiful."

They spent two hours in Freiburg and then, by a small
local train and a stage-coach, reached their destination, a
rural hotel on the shores of the dark mountain lake called
the Titisee. The lake near the shore was black with a
golden gleam here and there, like the luster of coal, and
farther away, screened by white mist. The heavy black
boughs of the hemlock trees seemed weighed down by the
burden of some secret of the woods, and the drip-
pings from the branches were like the whisperings of
elves.

"Romantic — eh?" remarked Atherton, as they lingered
to glance at the lake once more before stepping into the
house.

Peter nodded. He felt faithless to Italy, as if he were
forgetting a fiery-eyed, stately Roman love for a dreamy
northern damsel.

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"I must finish my chapter on aesthetics here," said the
philosopher, "so I sha'n't disturb you at all."

And Atherton ket his word throughout their first week
at the Titisee. They met usually at meals, except when
Peter was gone for the day with his paint-box and easel on
tramps through the woods, but for the rest of the time
each went on his own way ; even the long, quiet evenings
each would spend in his own room, Atherton to continue
his work, Peter to read books that his companion and
guide had lent him — ^books of art criticism, poetry and
philosophic meditation.

So Peter would step out to the lakeside every morning
with his mind tuned to the mystic beauties of the wood.
As the sky continued to be cloudy and the air dimmed by
haze, Peter felt on his wanderings as if he were walking
through a sacred forest veiled by curtains of mist from
the exoteric gaze. His ear grew keen to understand the
songs of birds, the rustling of squirrels on the boughs and
the murmur of the wind in the branches ; his eye made
friends with the many quaint varieties of moss, the deli-
cate lace-work ferns, the speckled toadstools, the frail
bluebells at his feet, and he learned to know the strong,
moist aromas of the herbs and needles on the rich, black
soil. Then, when between showers he could quickly paint
a sketch, he would try to hold fast all the exquisite tidings
that the forest had brought to his senses, as if the eye
were spokesman for them all. He would paint a scroll
of fog unrolled on a mountain side, a waterfall sparkling
between black pines, a glimpse of the Titisee with its
black shadows, or only a grove of somber hemlock trees.
But half the time he would not paint at all, only feel the
landscape and communicate with the elfin spirits of the

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woods that were whispering and murmuring in the
branches. The sweetness of solitude touched him with a
mysterious beguilement and peopled the silent woods with
a host of ethereal companions. Whenever, during his
lonely tramps, figures from his former life slipped into
his reveries — Cecile or Mrs. Montague, friends from
Boheme or friends from home — in his memory they be-
came rarified, made of the same substance as the fairy
creatures in the forest. There was nothing to draw Peter
away and the day glided past in a beguiling monotony
of delight.

After two weeks of mists and raindrops, the sun began
to scatter the clouds and gradually to unveil itself in its
true summer glory. The sky turned clearer and brighter,
till at last it wore even an Italian blue. The Titisee
varied its tints with the sky, though along the banks the
shadows from the trees were still the old sombre black;
and the forest paths were shadowy and mysterious as
before, except for the gleam of sunbeams through
the branches and the golden spots they made on the
ground.

"You will have to paint a different landscape today,"
said Atherton, who for the first time took his books out
to work under the trees.

"Yes," replied Peter, "and I am going to leave the
woods for the day and go to the village, where I can see
more of the sun."

"Your eyes are used to mist now," continued Ather-
ton, "the sun will dazzle you. Good luck! When you
come back, you will still find me in the shade — ^but not
sporting with Amaryllis."

"That's gone by for me, too," said Peter, with no little

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pride in the serenity and aloofness of ^irit that he had
learned from his master.

Cheerfully Peter took the steep path up a mountain
that led to the village Saig on the airy plateau that had
no trees to shut out the sun. As he walked on the yield-
ing ground and brushed against the dewy branches of the
young trees and the spicy fragrance of moss and herbs
rose to his nostrils like a familiar greeting, Peter's heart
sang within him. Whenever he came to a clearing, he had
to turn round and look back at the lake that now lay blue
and glittering in its bed of black mountain slopes, and at
the Feldberg, the highest mountain of all, that towered
above the Titisee.

When Peter reached the village, he took off his hat and
bathed his face in the warm, benevolent sunlight. The
houses, all quaint and cheerful to look at, were of white
plaster with dark beams running through the walls, and
pointed roofs ; or of brown wood with very low roofs that
sloped almost to the ground, with high stairs and little
balconies and porches; and on the steeple of the white
church was a big stork's nest. Rosy children laughed
mischievously at him on his way, and chickens scurried
across his path. Peter rested in the garden of a little irai,
where he ordered his rural noon dinner and ate it while
the hens ate theirs at his feet, and the landlord made con-
versation, asking Peter whence he came and whither he
was going. The .landlord's red-cheeked blond daughter
stood near by, knitting a thick stocking and listening with
open mouth.

Leisurely Peter left the hospitable inn, after he had
lingered there for some time, and strolled about in search
of a sunny spot, to paint a sketch that should be quite dif-

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ferent from his hazy or somber studies of the last two
weeks. He chose a grassy slope and the side of a peasant
cottage with a low, overhanging roof and a high, haz-
ardous looking flight of stairs that led to the side door;
a broad, round apple tree touching the roof with its
foliage ; in the background wooded mountains and a for-
get-me-not blue sky.

Peter had scarcely begun to paint when a chubby little
boy, perhaps six years old, who was biting lustily into a
big, thick piece of black bread, tripped timidly up behind
him and watched the strange conjury. A goose-girl fol-
lowed, coming down the path with her chattering flock,
then a boy with a fishing-rod and a bunch of brook
trout ; then more children, ten or twelve years old, ruddy,
barefoot boys and girls, who stopped their singing to
stand behind the strange painter and stare. Last of all
came the innkeeper's daughter, in her comely peasant
.dress, with the short black skirt, bright green apron, vel-
vet laced bodice and white puffed sleeves, and stood with
the rest to watch, still knitting her stocking with nimble
hands. There was some nudging, some sniffling laugh-
ter, some stepping on one another's bare feet among the
children, but little conversation except in whispers and
words that Peter did not understand. The geese grew
impatient and roused the goose-girl out of her revery ; the
little boy with the black bread — ^now all eaten up — ^ran
after geese and goose-girl with a shout of joy; the boy
with the fishing-rod went his way, and the children gradu-
ally dispersed. Only the innkeeper's daughter stayed
behind, still knitting away in silence.

"Where do you come from?** she finally broke the calm
in her quaint Black Forest accent

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"From down there by the Titisce/* answered Peter, in
his Munich German.

"Oh Y* said the lass, and knitted on.

She could not be more than fifteen, though she was
broad'Shouldered and strong, and her bright, blue eyes
had the wondering look of a child.

"But you are only a summer guest, aren't jrou?' she
began again. "You don't belong here?"

"You are right," said Peter, "I don't bdong here. But
I love the Titisee so much that I never want to go away."

"But aren't you afraid — ^isn't it uncanny?" she asked^
with wide-open eyes.

"What?" asked Peter.

"The Titisee," she replied. 'Tton't you know?^

Peter shook his head.

"There is a sunken city down at the bottom," she said,
in an awe-struck tone. "Sometimes at night you can hear
the church bells ring. . . . Have you never heard tiiem?**

"No," said Peter, "but I will go to the lake at midnight
now, and not go to bed till I have heard the bells."

"Oh, they don't ring always," she explained eagerly,
"only once in a great while. Do you know why the city
had to sink into the lake?" she asked in a voice fraught
with secrets.

"No— tell me," said Peter, turning round from his
work.

"Because the people in that city were so wicked," she
said impressively. "They were wicked and idle and
wasteful — so wasteful that they walked on bread crusts
for shoes. Then their punishment came, and the whole
city sank down deep to the bottom of the lake."

"Oh !" exclaimed Peter. "How terrible and how won-

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derful! Is the Thisee very, very deep, do you sup*
pose?"

"Nobody knows/' she answered, "and nobody can ever
know. Because once a man began to measure how deep
it was with a line that he let down from his boat, and then
a vdce called up from the deep : 'If you measure me I
will swallow you !' Then he was frightened to death, of
course, and rowed to shore as fast as he could, and, of
course, no one has dared to measure the depth since."

"Of course not !" said Peter, and resumed his painting.

Again she watched him silently for a while, then said
abruptly :

"Have you no work?"

"This is my work," said Peter.

"Oh !" said the child, puzzled. "That doesn't seem like
real work — ^more like play."

"It gives me just as much joy as if it were play," said
Peter.

"But what do you do with it after it is done?" she
asked simply.

"I hang it on my wall," Peter replied, "or somebody else
hangs it on his wall."

There was nothing lifelike as yet on Peter's canvas, so
that he could hardly blame the child for her doubt.

"Do other people want pictures like that?" she asked;
"do they buy them?"

Peter nodded.

"Even if they didnV' he said, loftily, "I should paint
them, all the same."

"Just for yourself?" asked the child, in a tone of
wonder.

"Yes," said Peter, "just for myself."

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The child lingered yet awhile, then said :

"I have to go and help mother in the kitchen. Good-by."

"Good-by," he replied. "I shall come again and then
I'll ask for you at your father's inn, my little friend."

Peter raised his hat, whereupon she laughed merrily
and marched away briskly, while her blonde braids flut-
tered in the wind.

There she was hurr3ring to help with the daily work,
leaving him, as she supposed, to frivolous idleness ! The
child left a dim soreness in his heart. Was it the wonder
in her big blue eyes that had taken hold of him and made
him wonder, too? "J^st for yourself?" she had asked,
so puzzled and estranged. And perhaps she was right:
was he joining in any work? What was he oflFering to
his fellow-men?

Nothing. He was isolated from the working and play-
ing world, alone with a master whose words he gathered
up like rose leaves strewn at his feet, and to whom he
had nothing to give in turn. Solitude was enticingly sweet,
but it had a bitter kernel.

Peter sketched till well into the afternoon, then he
packed his tools together, planning to come again. Before
he should turn into his homeward path, he wanted to stroll
about a little on the green, sunny plateau. The cheerful
tinkle of herd-bells in the clear air as the cattle trudged
down the road from the wide pastures, and the fresh,
homely scent of hay drew Peter on. Fields of golden rye
were now swaying in the light breeze, and the sunburnt
peasants were tramping home.

How could he look these sturdy workers in the face,
he who roamed in solitude and sucked the honey of con-
templation, who painted as he might sing to himself in

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the woods, who had spun a cocoon round himself to es-
cape harsh sounds and sights from the world without !

The wondering eyes of the child were haunting him
still, and her voice of awe as she had told him about the
Titisee. Was he not like the inhabitants of the sunken
city, idle, frivolous and wasteful of these golden days?
Was he not, as it were, treading on the bread of life with
careless, wayward feet? Would his spirit, too, like the
city of the Titisee, sink into a depth of darkness and of
death?

A weariness of spirit came over Peter. Would this
dream-life go on forever? No, he had known from the
start that it could not, that it was only a passing stage of
solitary contemplation before he would set out again on
some new path. Where that path was and whither it
would lead he did not know, and his spirits were too
languid for a search. For the present — ^while the sum-
mer lasted, at least — ^he would linger in Lotos-land and
let the future take care of itself. Thoughts of the future,
of late, had filled him with a loathing, because the present
hour had smiled beguilingly and he had heard no warning
to "heed the rumble of a distant drum." So now he
shook the alarming thoughts out of his mind lightly, as
he shook dust from his shoes, and turned into the path
to the Titisee, where the philosopher was waiting in the
forest.

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CHAPTER XIV

THE VISION AGAIN

PETER was back again in his old studio in Munich —
but it seemed no longer the same old studio. An-
other man's sketches were hanging on the wall, another
man's relics, ash-trays, candle-sticks and wine-glasses were
strewn about, besides fencing-foils and sabers that were
foreign to the New Englander. It had happened oddly
enough that in the breakfast-room of the hotel, where he
had spent the first night back in Munich with Atherton, he
should have met Hartung, who was setting out for a
tramp in the mountains. Then Hartung had told him that
he had rented and lived in Peter's studio during his ab-
sence, and had then invited Peter to live in his former
haunt until Hartung should come back from the moun-
tains. Further, Peter was told that his own pictures,
sketches and relics that he had put under Jack Woodfin's
care had been intrusted to Hartung for some time, while
Jack had been away on a vacation — ^where, Hartung did
not know, for Jack's departure had been mysterious and
sudden. So Peter had become once more the keeper of
his own treasures, which otherwise would have been left
unguarded, locked in the dusty studio; and, moreover,
the inhabitant of his old workshop.

Cecile's studio, which he had sought finally, after much

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hesitation, he had found deserted ; for Cecile, as the jani-
tor told him, had gone away on a vacation with her cousin
Vira. Though it was a reHef to Peter that he would not
have to meet her again after their last good-by, life in
Mtmich seemed unnatural without at least the possibility
of meeting Cecile.

So, just as he felt out of place in his old studio with its
new decorations, now that he was without his regular
work and his old friends, who were almost all away in
the mountains or at some artist's colony in the country,
he felt estranged in his so familiar Munich. Indeed, if
Atherton had not needed the University library, and if
Peter had not been under the spell of the philosopher
and reluctant to part with his guidance, Peter would not
have gone back to Munich so soon. But as it was, he had
followed his master and was now back in his old work-
shop, with no incentive to work. While Atherton spent
his days in the library, Peter roamed about the city alone,
like a tourist, accustomed as he was for the last months
of travel to go every day on a hunt for beauty.

One Sunday morning, when he was strolling through
the Shack Gallery, he was impressed by the eager faces
of the country people and simple citizens for whom the
pictures were messages from a bright land remote from
their thrifty work-a-day world.

"Look, mamma, here it is !" cried a little fourteen-year-
old girl, in a stiff white dress, with a wreath of corn-
flowers on her hat. "We saw it in a picture-book in
school."

It was the picture by Schwindt of a young girl looking
out of the window at the mountains early in the morning,
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happy smile on the pale, tired face of her mother. Peter
sighed : when would a work of his bring a gleam of hap-
piness to a tired face through an echo from a seraphic
world where cares for daily bread, sickness and weari-
ness cannot penetrate? Surely, not the tmfinished
sketches from his journey — exquisite glimpses of a
drowsy lake, of mist on a mountain side, of a gloomy pine
grove, of a quaint alley or a lonely cypress tree — ^held fast
imperfectly without seriousness, without true joy, with-
out soul.

When he was meditating thus mournfully, he suddenly
felt the pressure of a hand on his arm.

"Why so sad?" asked a cheerful voice.

It was the Dowager Empress, buxom and exuberant.

**What have you been doing with yourself all these
months ?" she asked in her good-natured, motherly voice.

"Oh, just wandering about idly," answered Peter, with
a shrug of his shoulders.

"What luxury!" exclaimed the good-natured woman,
without a tinge of envy. "Now, I am going to Salzburg
tomorrow for a little week to get a breath of mountain
air, my first vacation trip in five years, and I consider
myself lucky. But I'm glad for you, my son, and I want
to hear about your vacation. Come, take a little walk
with me in the sunshine. IVe just had my Sunday
glimpse at my favorites."

Peter consented, and they walked along the lively
streets among the happy folk in Sunday attire, who were
rejoicing in the sunshine. He had to give an account of
his journey to his kind listener, and when he had satisfied
her good-natured curiosity, he began to inquire about the
doings of their common friends.

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"Where is Jack?" he asked. "Hartung said that he had
gone off suddenly and mysteriously."

The Dowager Empress looked at Peter with a sly, puz-
zling glance. "You mean that you don't know?" she
asked curiously.

"No, why should I?" Peter replied. "We don't write
each other. Jack is no correspondent."

"So you really don't know?" the Dowager Empress
went on, in a tantalizing way.

"No, really not," said Peter, with waning patience.
"You are uncanny !"

"Jack has gone into the Tyrol,^' she said impressively,
"on his honeymoon — so to speak — ^with Cecile."

Peter stood in the middle of the street. So his surmise
had been right : Jack's compassion for Cecile had turned
into passion! He remembered now that, before he had
left Munich, he had thought — ^not without a pang — ^such
a course natural and apt for Jack and for Cecile, and
surely he was thinking so still, only his heart for an in-
stant seemed to stop beating.

"You dropped the wild rose on your careless walk," said
his companion, with kindly mockery, "and, you see. Jack
stooped and picked it up."

"Perhaps Jack deserved her more than I," said Peter,
with a sigh.

"How unnatural for you to be resigned — ^and that after
such a fine vacation journey, too," remarked his com-
panion ; "I always thought of you as a jolly good fellow."

"Oh, do think of me that way still," said Peter. "That's
the self I left behind in Munich when I went away after
Carnival, but I can't seem to find it again, now that I'm
back."

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''You are Peter Schlemiehl who has lost his shadow,"
laughed the Dowager Empress, "or, rather, the shadow
who has lost Peter."

Though the older woman's hearty companionship
pleased Peter, he could not reveal to her his change of
heart wrought by a philosopher's magic wand ; so he led
her artfully into the realm of gossip, and she lingered
there with much laughing and winking of her mischiev-
ous eyes. When she came back to Cecile in her accounts,
she grew sober.

"They did it very artfully," she said. "They by no
means vanished at the same time. Cecile went ahead
with Vira, who was probably soon sent off to seek her
own adventures, and Jack followed a week later. I knew,
because Cecile told me, and I supposed you knew because
you had been so intimate with both. Heller suspected,
but he is always suspecting something. By the way, did
you know his design for the fountain won the prize?"

Thus the kindly woman chatted on, and Peter would
have invited. her to dine with him somewhere in the coun-
try, away from the hot pavements, had he not promised
to meet Atherton ; and the philosopher and the Dowager
Empress did not seem to Peter a good pair. So, as she
was going to leave Munich the next morning, he said
good-by to his kind friend, not without regret.

While he had been listening to her gossip, Peter had felt
once more as if he belonged into his Bohemian circle, but
no sooner had Atherton walked into the restaurant where
Peter was waiting for him, than he seemed again to be
Rip Van Winkle returned after a hundred years. ,

"What have you been doing this morning?" said Ather-
ton.

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"Gossiping," answered Peter.

The philosopher did not ask with whom he had gos-
siped, as, indeed, Atherton seemed to lack all natural curi-
osity about private affairs.

"Fve been gossiping with Aristotle,** he said. "It's all
the same."

"Tell me about it," asked Peter. "My head feels so
empty. I should like to fill it up with philosophy."

"Oh, very well," answered Atherton, and while the
portly family at the table beside them was joking with
the waiter and studying the bill of fare with loud enthu-
siasm, Peter listened to his master's wisdom. They might
have been sitting at the Lake of Lugano as well as in a
Mtmich restaurant, or in a pine grove of the Black For-
est, or on the beach at home, for wherever Peter happened
to be with Atherton, his spirit lay reclined in lotos land.

But when Atherton had returned to his studies,
Peter fell rudely back to earth. The Sunday throng was
streaming past him: little girls \^ith white dresses and
flower hats ; cheerful, smug fathers and mothers holding
little children by the hand; soldiers arm in arm with
their sweethearts; young fellows in highland costume
starting out for long tramps in the country. Peter walked
alone. To beguile the remainder of the afternoon and
the evening in the open air, he rode to the exhibition
grounds outside of the city, where, besides the present
exhibition of Bavarian industry, there were revivals of
old puppet-plays, military band concerts, illuminated
fountains and a great air of gaiety. Peter wandered over
the decorative grounds until nightfall, when he chose a
little table for himself in the pavilion of the gayest restau-
rant in the park. A cello soloist was playing Wolfram's

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"Song to the Evening Star/' Sitting close to the path
where the merry throng floated by, Peter watched the
sprightly tete-a-tetes of youths and gaily-dressed damsels;
he listened to laughter that shot up like spray and dis-
solved out of ear-shot, to fragments of tender or jovial
discourse. Fragments — fragments all to the bystander
who had no more love of his own, no more youthful com-
radeship, no more holiday because of no more hard work I

The fountain opposite the pavilion was being illu-
minated, and a spontaneous "Oh V rose from the numer-
ous lips. Orange-golden glowed the delicate upward
shooting and downward dripping streams of water, then
cool blue and green, then rose, and finally blood-red. The
melancholy "Evening Star" had given way to Tann-
hauser's passionate song to Venus. The music and the
fountains seemed to blend together and make of the park
a gay fairyland of love and song and laughter. Only
Peter was outside.

Was he longing for Cecile? No, he did not want
Cecile back, for if she were sitting opposite him now, the
magic luster of their bond would be gone, just as the
miraculous orange-golden glow on the fountain vanished
whether he would keep it or not.

He was alone. Till midnight he lingered, sipping
Rhine wine in the pavilion, listening to the plaintive or
sprightly melodies, then walking up and down among
others* friends and lovers, like a beggar who would warm
himself by the sight of others' feasting.

When he rode home, a cool, moist wind was chilling
the air, and Peter came back to his studio shivering.
Scarcely had he gone to bed when rain beat down on the
roof, and the even noise kept him awake till four o'clock.

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Then he floated off into a light sleep with bad dreams, till
well into the morning. Why should he get up when there
was nothing to get up for? He might stay in bed all day,
and nobody would be aware of his absence, not even
Atherton, who was at this time all absorbed in his studies.
This morning even the Dowager Empress would be gone,
his last good friend in Munich, and his mere acquaint-
ances he was not in a mood to seek.

Because, after all, his limbs were healthy even though
his spirits were faint, Peter got up, went to the neighbor-
ing cafe for breakfast, and returned to the studio as if for
work, although there was no work to do. It was raining
drearily outside.

Why could he not hire a model and paint as he used to
paint before his fatal journey? Fatal indeed, for it had
killed in him all vigor for work beyond the leisurely
sketching of moods and glimpses, just as it had killed his
joy in laughter and carefree love ! Peter looked out of the
window. Market women were tramping through the rain,
carrying baskets on their heads; the letter carrier was
marching along with his heavy bag, and busy passers-by
were scurrying across the street as if each were bent on
some important mission. To see people hurrying to their
morning business was more painful even than to see them
at their nightly merrymaking, to an isolated idler. Petet
wondered why he was living at all, when it made no dif-
ference whether he was alive or dead.

Of course, he might shake himself and with a manly
effort begin work in his old, regular way. But at the
thought a great weariness of spirit overwhelmed him, and
besides, there was no subject in the wide world that he
wanted to paint. And why should he force himself to

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work against his will when nobody cared? Peter felt
quite dispensable, a careless drop too much in the uni-
verse.

Should he go to the studio of one of his many colleagues
in the neighborhood to seek stimulus and cheer? Peter
shrank from such a plan, because he had been spoiled for
harmless comradeship: intercourse for months with Ath-
erton alone had made him look on other men as vulgar I

And what was the fruit of these rare months with the
philosopher? Pessimism — a pessimism that sapped his
power to work and his joy to live ! What should he do?
Peter sat on his couch and stared at the gray, cracked
floor ; he hated himself, he was tired of his life, he wished
he had never been bom. Some people drank certain pow-
erful liquids when they felt like this, and never felt any
more at all. . . .

There was a knock at the door, but Peter did not
answer : let the intruder think that he was out ! The door
was opened and the postman threw in a letter. A blue
stamp was on it — from home! He snatched it and saw
Virginia's handwriting. Virginia — ^how dared she intrude
into these gloomy, poisonous thoughts! Had she come to
spy upon him, to laugh at him in his despair?

Dear Petek:

I suppose your rare joumey with Mr. Atherton is over and you
are back in Munich again, happy in your work, with yoiu: con*
genial friends, living the life that you have chosen. How I envy
youl I ought not to envy you— I ought to be glad that you have
found the life that makes you happy. But can you imagine not
being able to paint, and still living on?

Ifyou can, then have a little pity for me! I can't sing any more.
I try every day, but I feel as if there had been a great forest fire

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in my heart that had left nothing but barrel tree-stumps and
black waste.

I am so lonely. If there were only a soul in your home town
and mine who cared for the things we care aboutl They think
me queer and it's the worst crime in Gullport to be queer. Father
doesn't see why I'm not having the time of my life playing auction
and dancing with dull boys; mother is so tired that I don't want
to worry her with my own woes. They are such ethereal woes, too,
that I could never tell about them, but they are quite real just
the same. I go into Aunt Clarissa's garden — do you remember the
bower there? — and cry and cry.

Oh Peter, if you were only here I You are the one soul who
would understand; you always did understand. I wish you were
coming back.

Faithfully yours,
Virginia.

P.S. At Hrst I thought I would tear up this foolish letter, but
now I am sending it after all.

All at once the world was transformed for Peter. He
ran back and forth, read the letter over again, folded it,
put it into his pocket, took it out again and read it once
more.

Was it true— quite true? Peter ran his finger along
the line : "I wish you were coming back." Yes, it was
truly written, black on white I

A tired and lonely soul was calling to him for help.
He was not living in vain, he was not superfluous, not a
drop too much in the universe! And the soul that was
clamoring for him was Virginia.

Virginia ! What a fool he had been, what an utter fool !
Why had he left her, almost forgotten her while he was
wandering astray in foreign lands ? He knew now that he

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had always loved her, that they had been born under the
same star, that he had been erring, and that his eyes had
been opened at last. He would fly to her and help her —
but how? Must he be impotent to help her who had
come to his aid twice as the keeper of his vision? . . .
His vision !

Red poppies flamed before his inward eye, radiant, glo-
rious, and in the midst of the scarlet sea stood a child
with curls of glistening gold ; and over all streamed bril-
liant sunlight. The vision was there : he held it fast, and
it should never, never flee again !

In frantic haste he rushed to a corner of the studio,
rummaged among the canvases there, found the extra
large one that he had already stretched, put it on the
easel which he moved quickly to the window, took up an
old piece of charcoal and sketched in the composition for
his work. Oh, the drawing was the least part of this pic-
ture, for his vision was in glowing colors — even the
brightest red !

The light was very poor, but he would begin to paint in
spite of it, lest, if he waited for sunshine, the vision should
fly away. So, when the time came, Peter began to paint.
Red — red — ^there was never enough red on his palette!
First he wanted to mass the colors, and then he would
paint the child and the poppies with unequaled care. If
it should take him a year to paint this picture, he would
not tire of it for a moment. . . .

Neither would he return to Virginia until this painting
should be finished, even though she might be disappointed,
for this should be his gift to her, his artist's help for her
despondency, his surrender of the vision.

All day Peter worked, not stopping for a meal, except

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some crackers that he found in a box on his table and a
cordial ; all day, though the rain kept pouring down and
the air was chilly, he warmed his heart by the fiery red
of his poppies. Mysteriously he felt that this was the
greatest day of his life, although he was all alone in a
cold, dark studio and he had begun the day in despair.
The vision was always there, and before he would touch
his brush to the canvas, he would consult it : "Is my red
flaming enough ?" "Has my sunlight enough glow ?" And
the vision would never fail to answer from its inaccessible
height and show him his error.

A knock at the door startled Peter who had forgotten
that there was anything else in the world but his vision
and his canvas to reflect it.

"Come in !" he called, unwillingly.

"So fanatic!" Atherton exclaimed lightly, as he came
into the studio. "Do you remember that we were to meet
at seven, and now it is eight !"

"Oh — Fm sorry — Fm sorry," mumbled Peter. "I
suppose I must stop now."

"Why this sudden fervor?" asked Atherton, approach-
ing the easel.

"Oh, don't look — ^please don't !" cried Peter, like an ex-
cited child, standing in front of the canvas. "Nobody
must see this until it is done !"

"Oh, very well," said Atherton, with a tranquil smile,
"this seems to be a very passionate kiss of the Muse."

Peter covered his precious canvas with a cloth, and fol-
lowed his companion to the restaurant where they had
planned to meet, and where Atherton had already waited
an hour. Now Peter felt that he was hungry and tired,
although he could have painted on through the night. If

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one could only paint by lamplight ! Well, daylight would
dawn again soon, and he wotild get up early in the morn-
ing.

They were rather silent tonight, for Peter could not give
the philosopher the attention that he was wont to bestow
upon him. When they had nearly finished, Atherton, who
did not seem to mind Peter's absent-mindedness in the
least, said gaily :

"You don't know, Peter, that I have finished my work
here — ^that is, I don't need the library any more — and that
I am quite ready now for the mountains. What do you
say to Berchtesgaden?"

Peter was silent He would not stir out of Munich
until the picture was finished, and if Hartung should
come back at the end of the month and claim his studio —
why, then Peter must move into another. If he should
follow his guide into the mountains now and take up
again the life of feisurely meditation and sipping of eso-
teric pleasures, who knew but that languor and indiffer-
ence might come over him again and weaken the heart
and the hand that must paint his great picture — ^perhaps
even make the vision fly away !

How could he tell Atherton about his fears? For,
though he was a wise philosopher, Atherton would never
understand Peter's vision — ^perhaps because it was not of
the understanding. It was hard now to break loose from
his companion and guide without seeming capricious and
ungrateful. And besides, after all, he was giving up a
rare and exquisite life !

"You are silent," said Atherton.

"I'm — I'm — I'm — ^very, very sorry," stammered Peter,
"but I can't go with you any more."

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"How does that happen?" asked Atherton, cahnly.

"I shall never have such a rare time again as I had with
you in Italy, and by the lakes, and in the Black Forest,"
said Peter, unsteadily. "I'll never forget it. I'm mighty
grateful to you. But, you see, I've begun this new
picture . . ."

"And can't you take that with you?" asked Atherton,
with a faintly sarcastic smile, "and finish it somewhere
else? I didn't see you work with a model."

"No, I have to finish it here," said Peter eagerly ; "if I
went away, I might be distracted. I sha'n't stir out of
Munich till it is perfect — if I have to stay here a year and
a day!"

"And pray," asked Atherton serenely, "what is the sub-
ject of this absorbing work?"

"I can't tell you," said Peter, irritated by the philoso-
pher's calm, "because you wouldn't understand."

"Indeed!" said Atherton, with unrufHed composure,
raising his eyebrows in delicate irony.

"You are a pessimist !" cried Peter, forgetting the awe
that Atherton had always inspired in him. "You shun life
for isolated contemplation — ^and I must have life itself in
my new work — life, with its will and zest and joy!"

"So you are tired of contemplation," said Atherton,
with his haughty smile, "and I shall have to go on alone."

How little Atherton seemed to care whether Peter fol-
lowed him or not ! This piqued Peter, but on the other
hand, he was relieved from a guilty sense of having given
oflFence. He did not know whether to envy Atherton for
his untroubled aloofness from the passions that swayed
and broke the hearts of common men, or whether to pity
him because he stood apart from the warm tide of life.

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"I hope it will be a very great picture," said Atherton.
*'Such a rebellion against another's views of life is a sign
of artistic health."

"How strange it seems to hear you say that," replied
Peter; "you, who never rebel against any view— you,
who only smile at all views but )rour own/'

"I am not the artist," said Atherton. "It is for youth
like yours to rush on in its blindness and ardor and create
works out of its passion. It is for ageless contemplation
like mine to judge these works and say: 'Look, here is
beauty!'"

Peter seized Atherton's hand and shook it in an out-
burst of gratitude.

"How easy it is for you to forgive," he said, eagerly.
**You are a true philosopher."

"And when the picture is finished," Atherton inter-
rupted, "will you take up your life of Boheme once
more?"

"No," said Peter, "then I am going home — ^I have
summons home."

"So we shall meet again when college has opened and
I go back to my academic routine in September," Ather-
ton remarked, cheerfully; "perhaps on Mrs. Montague's
piazza."

"Mrs. Montague!" he exclaimed. "How long ago it
seems — ^how could I ever . . .?"

"How could you ever have dangled at her apron-
strings?" said Atherton. "You will ask yourself how you
could have done many things before you are old. She
was a part of your education, so was I. . . . And now,
let us see if you have found yourself."

Till midnight Peter sat with his companion, now no

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longer the master over his spirit, drinking champagne to
celebrate their last night together, and talking as if there
had never been a shadow of discord between them. And,
indeed, there had been none, for Peter understood that
where there was no resistance against rebellion, there was
no discord, and that for this philosopher there could never
be a jarring note in the serene and haughty harmony of
his mind.

"Good-by," were Atherton's last words. "I shall look
for something distinguished from you/'

Then Peter climbed up to his studio and sank into the
deepest, most restful sleep that he had slept for months.
When he woke up, rain was still beating on the roof and
the city looked dreary and gray from the window. But
there was a light that radiated from within him into every
shadowy comer of his dark studio. Today he would work
in sober earnest after the first inspired beginning had been
made ; and he would work every day from early morning
till dusk, as long as the vision stayed. For the vision had
survived the long evening with Atherton and the deep
sleep of the night, and it was flaming before his mind's eye
with its first glory.

Peter searched all his sketches of little girls that he
could find to use for his painting of the child ; but though
he used them as aids for his drawings, the true child with
its sparkling eyes and radiant golden curls had to be
copied from the vision itself. And as for the red poppies
— he scorned to buy poppies from the peasant women
on the marketplace to use as models, because no poppies
in the gardens and fields about Munich had a redness as
bright as the scarlet in his heart.

And the vision was a stem task-master. Work that

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at other times would have satisfied Peter, now left him ha
peace on the steep path to perfection. Never had he
painted over so much that had already been done with
careful labor ; never had he made so many separate studies
for one big picture, as in these days of intense work. He
would go to bed early, so that he could wake up at five
o'clock, boil his tea on a little kerosene stove that Hartung
had left in the studio, eat the rolls that the baker's boy
brought him early in the morning for breakfast, and then
start out to work when the city was just beginning to stir
beneath his window.

For two weeks it rained every day, and although it was
5A.ugust, the studio was chilly. Then the summer sun
dried the pavements, cleared the sky and beckoned out of
doors. Now that gradually some of Peter's friends —
among them the Dowager Empress — ^were coming back
from their vacations, he met them occasionally at supper
in the Zoological Gardens or some rural place outside of
Munich, but he let no one visit his studio, and till dusk he
worked alone. Hartung and Heller had not come back,
nor Jack and Cecile, to his great relief, for he feared lest
embers of an old passion, though supposed dead, might
once more be kindled, if only for a moment, into a flame.

Sometimes, exhausted from the day's work, he would
look at his incomplete painting and ask: "How near is
it to the vision ?" and the answer would be : "Still very,
very far!" Then his courage would sink and his task
would seem too great to be anything but hopeless.

It was in such hours of gathering doubts that Peter
took out Virginia's letter, like a talisman, and read it over
to draw from it new hope and zeal. Virginia believed in
him — ^so he must believe in himself. And if he should

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win at last over all obstacles, then he would dare to claim
Virginia's love, more precious than a multitude of laurel
wreaths.

After all, Virginia iii her earliest childhood was the
radiant child of the vision, and the great sparkling eyes
that he was painting with tender care were Virginia's eyes
as they were sparkling still. How much he loved her he
knew now as he had never guessed before her letter,
heavy with fate, had broken into his despair. It seemed,
indeed, as if the book of his love had been stowed away,
sealed, in a comer of his heart and now lay open. For he
was thinking of her all day, and sometimes he almost be-
lieved that she was standing behind him to watch his work
and compare his painting with the vision that she and
Peter alone could see.

Thus a month passed in daily toil. Then came a day—*
the tenth of September — ^when Peter asked himself:
"What can I add now?'* And a voice within him said:
"Nothing."

Then he shut his eyes for a few moments, and when
he opened them again, he saw the vision. A sea of blood-
red poppies was gleaming jubilant and glorious ; a child
with sun-lit golden curls was standing in their midst, its
radiant eyes wide open in wonder; and over all there
hovered a strong, joyous glow of sunshine. Was it
really the vision that gleamed before him? No, it was his
own painting. But it must be the vision, for it had the
radiance, the jubilant red poppies that it alone revealed I
It was the vision, but it was the painting, too: for the
picture and the vision were one.

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CHAPTER XV

PETER woke up early in the morning, roused by a
gust of salt air. He was at home ! He was in the
sunny room in which he had waked up at five years in the
same way as now, with the view through the big window
of the apple tree and the white house beyond. To be at
home again meant simply to be Peter, the son of his father
and mother, and whatever he stood for in the world out-
side mattered little here. Nevertheless, he had dreaded
somewhat the account of his year in Munich because,
though he had written letters enough, his father and
mother could never quite understand just what the life of
Boheme was for, nor why it appeared in such odd terms,
and so he had lingered longest on his report of the jour-
ney with Atherton. But Peter did not have to do all the
telling, for when he was once back in GuUport, the town
was the world and the rest of the globe merely a provincial
appendix. He had come just in time for Dick's wedding
to Elsie Robins, as his mother had told him with great ex-
citement in the first ten minutes, and, besides, there were
several new engagements in the town. . . .

Thus echoes of the night before flitted through Peter's
mind, as he lay drowsily in bed, but all the while there
was a dull pain at the bottom of his heart : Virginia was

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away ! Every morning on the steamer he had waked up
saying to himself : only so many days more before I shall
see Virginia and she will see the "Red Poppies." No one
else should lay eyes on his life-work — life-work it was, for
his life, as it were, had been sharpened to this point —
before Virginia had seen his vision and hers incarnate.
He had meant his homecoming as a surprise for her;
therefore, as no secret was safe in his native town, he had
not announced his return to his parents until his arrival
in New York. And now Virginia had just left for a
month of rest in the White Mountains with her mother,
because, as Peter's mother had said, both were very tired
and Virginia quite depressed, as if she had some great
sorrow. Peter knew the ailment of her spirit and dared
to believe that he had the remedy. But he knew, too, that
he could not expect Virginia, who lived in a world of re-
strictions, to leave her mother, and, at his bidding, fly to
her healer. No; he would write to her, and at best he
could hope that she would shorten her stay in the moun-
tains.

Should the "Red Poppies" wait unseen in the box down-
stairs in the hall, which he had sent ahead before he had
left Munich himself — should it wait until Virginia would
come and sanction his work ? Then he could not send it to
the big fall exhibition, which would come in a few weeks,
as he had read in the newspaper on his way through Bos-
ton, and that was the one exhibition through which he had
hoped to speak to the artists of his country. Virginia or
the world? Why not both at the same time? He would
send the picture off today, and when it should hang in
the gallery — ^horror, if it should be rejected — he would
lead Virginia there on the first day of their meeting again.

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But the "Red Poppies" should remain unseen in his
father's house. He would take one more glimpse of the
picture now before his father and mother were up, then
hide it and take it himself to the frame-maker's in Boston
this very afternoon.

So Peter jumped out of bed and dressed hurriedly, lest
his father or mother should be down before him, and with
a hammer opened the box that held his treasure. He took
out the picture, set it up on a chair in the parlor where it
had the best light, looked at it critically and was satisfied.
His heart beat swiftly as he said to himself: "This is
really mine."

Now for a frame ! He ran up to his room to rummage
among old frames that he had left at home and search
for one that would be big enough. After much rummag-
ing, he found one that might serve just for his own satis-
faction, and hurried down with it, eager to see his "Red
Poppies" framed in gold.

Peter rushed to the parlor — but he stopped short on the
threshold, for his father was standing in front of the
"Red Poppies." He was taking off his spectacles, wiping
them and putting them on again ; his mouth was half open,
like a child's, in wonder, and in his dim eyes there was a
gleam of timid joy.

"Peter !" he exclaimed, when he saw his son coming.
"Is this yours?"

Peter knew that this question required no answer, that
it was only a haphazard utterance, because his father, un-
used as he was to praise of red poppies, did not know what
to say. Therefore Peter only nodded, and his father
turned back to the picture and gazed at it in rapt silence.
The spell was broken : Virginia was not to be the first who

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should see the captured vision! There was disappoint-
ment in that, and yet something less hoped for, something
more unsurmised was happening silently in the parlor of
his father's house.

Peter held his breath. His father closed his lips, opehed
them as if he would speak, but closed them again. What
could be working in his mind?

"Peter," he said at last, "this is a psalm of praise.'*

The unexpected, the unhoped for had happened : Peter's
father had called the "Red Poppies" a psalm of praise!
More he could not have said, and Peter had not even
hoped for the smallest tribute of genuine respect for his
work from his father!

"I'm glad," was all that Peter murmured, inanely.

But there was joyous riot in his heart. Into his memory
rose something that one of his colleagues in Munich had
once said, namely, that all really great art appealed to the
unschooled and naive. Had he attained that greatness now
which made the naive — for none could be more naive and
unschooled in art than his father — ^pay impulsive tribute
of praise to the fruit of his work? If his father would
have come unawares upon "The Dancing Gipsy" or the
"Laughing Woman with Mirror," he would have turned
away embarrassed, as from a book in a strange language,
but the speech of the "Red Poppies" he understood.

"Mary!" called Peter's father, when his mother was
coming downstairs. "Come and see Peter's newest pic-
ture!"

Peter's mother came into the room timidly, as if she
were afraid that she might not have all the enthusiasm
for this newest painting that she would like to shower on
her boy. But when she stood in front of the picture, she

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started, and an almost frightened "Oh !" burst from her
lips.

"Why, that's Virginia in grandma's garden !" she cried
out. "How can you remember so far back? Why, you
were a little thing then— only six years, I guess! Oh,
how bright those poppies are, as if the sun were shining
on them this minute ! Dear me, it makes me happy to look
at them — it seems as if grandma were still living — as if
we could just step down into her garden — ^as if you were
little again and Virginia a baby with light curls, instead of
straight dark hair! How could you ever remember so
farback, and just how red the poppies were? . . . Oh,
my boy !"

Her mild, gray-blue eyes were glistening and she stood
on tiptoe to kiss her son on his cheek. This was almost
too much for Peter : such ardent response from his own
father and mother! If hearts could break from holding
too much joy, Peter's heart would have been shattered
now, had it not missed Virginia, who should have been
the first to bless his work.

"I'm going to take this to the frame-maker's in Bos-
ton this afternoon," said Peter, "and then I'll have it
sent straight to the Studio Qub for the big fall exhibi-
tion."

"Oh, they'll take it, surely," said Peter's mother; "if
they don't, they are fools !"

She blushed, for it was not her wont to speak in such
emphatic terms.

"It's too bad that you have to send it away so soon,"
said Peter's father. "I should like to have the Taylors see
it, and the Grimshaws and Elsie — ^all our friends would
enjoy it."

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"They can see it when it's hung," said Peter. "If it's
hung! I have no reputation as a landscape painter here,
you know !"

"Oh, it must be hung!" Peter's mother repeated.

The family breakfast was merrier than any Peter could
remember, and a joy— quite different from the cheer at his
homecoming of the night before — ^seemed to radiate from
his picture and reflect in the eyes of his father and
mother.

Now that the spell was broken and Virginia could no
longer be the first to see the vision crystallized, Peter
thought that of all the people in GuUport, he would like to
show his painting to his old teacher. In the course of the
morning, therefore, Peter strolled to the hermitage. As he
looked out over the deep blue sea that gleamed behind the
boughs of the woods in their autumn foliage, he thought
of his old teacher's son, and wondered with how much
joy he and Cecile were feasting on the apple in the gar-
den of Eden that he had left behind. How happy he was
today to be back at home, away from the sultry air of
"Boheme," breathing the salt wind of the sea !

He knocked with the old knocker on the door of the
hermitage, and the door was opened by the wild man of
the woods, shaggier and rougher to look upon than ever,
but with a happy twinkle of surprise and welcome in his
eyes.

"Well, well, Peter!" he exclaimed, in his gruff voice.
"Back from Munich so soon !"

"Yes," said Peter. "I'm back. And I^m glad to be at
home again. But I've had a jolly time with Jack. I saw
more of him than of any other man in Munich — ^he's a
great figure with the artists there."

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*'Well, how is the boy?'* asked Mr. Woodfin, with seem-
ing indiflference, though his eyes were sparkUng.

Peter sat down in the hermitage and told his old teacher
about Jack's work and Jack's studio and his jollities, and
the part he played among his colleagues.

"No woman has got hold of him now?" asked Jack's
father.

"There was none while I was with him in Munich," re-
plied Peter, unsteadily, "but a thousand things may have
happened since then."

For he could not betray the secret of Jack and Cecile,
which had not been confided to him at all.

"Well, and what's your work been like ?" asked Peter's
old teacher. "Done any landscapes? I don't suppose so,
pent up in the city there."

"Oh, I went on a journey through Italy with Mr. Ather-
ton, and then stayed by the Italian lakes and in the Black
Forest," answered Peter; "and there I did only land-
scapes. I have my latest picture at home with me now,"
he said, with sudden eagerness. "Do you want to see it?"

"I do — surely,^' said Mr. Woodfin. "I want to see what
Munich has done for you."

"I'm going to take it to Boston to be framed this after-
noon," said Peter. "I want to send it to the big fall
exhibit"

"That's a good beginning," said Mr. Woodfin; "111 go
right over with you now and look at it."

This was the response for which Peter had hoped. He
walked home at the side of his old teacher, as in the days
when they used to go sketching together, but on the walk
he was growing worried by the thought that Mr. Wood-
fin might not be satisfied with the "Red Poppies." What

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if he should shake his head or remain silent, or even have
some fault to find ?

When they reached the gate of the yard, Peter hoped
that something would happen to delay the moment that
he feared ; but no intruder was coming down the street to
detain them, and the gate stood open. There was no one
in the parlor when they came, and the picture was covered
with a cloth.

"This is it!" he said, in a forced matter-of-fact tone,
and raised the cloth to reveal the "Red Poppies."

Mr. Woodfin looked and, as Peter had feared, remained
silent. For a long, long time he stood thus silently look-
ing, while Peter's heart throbbed as if he were waiting for
a death sentence. Had he failed in the eyes of his
teacher? . . . Then all was over! Silence. . . . Silence.

Mr. Woodfin spoke. "That's the greatest picture that
has been painted in America these last ten years," he said
gruffly.

"Then— you think they'll take it?" Peter stam-
mered foolishly, for his teacher's abrupt utterance had
made him a little dizzy.

"Take it?" repeated Mr. Woodfin, with a short, rough
laugh. After a long pause he went on : "So Munich has
done something for you — I'm beginning to think Jack
knows what he's talking about !"

"Oh, but this isn't Munich," said Peter impulsively,
but stopped short, because he could not betray the vision
to Mr. Woodfin.

"What is it, then ?" asked his teacher.

"Oh, it's what was left over from Munich and all 'the
other stages of my career," Peter replied, then added,
laughing: "And don't forget that I am your pupil."

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"I'm not exactly ashamed of my pupil," said Mr. Wood-
fin, laughing awkwardly, and started toward the door.

Peter could not induce him to linger and talk to his
father and mother, for that was not the way of the hermit.
In the doorway Peter stood and watched the great, gaunt
wizard of the wood tramp down the street, and his heart
beat wildly, as it had done when he was a little boy/ and
had first been granted lessons from the strange wild
painter. If only Virginia were here to share some of his
exuberant joy !

The week or more of waiting would be dreary, before
he would dare to call Virginia back. Should he follow
her to the White Mountains and in the happiness of seeing
her again and spending days of undisturbed leisure with
her in the peaceful woods, forget that the jury was decid-
ing the fate of the "Red Poppies," forget that his life-
work was anything but a painting like any of his other
paintings, forget that anything mattered in this world but
that lovers should find each other and rejoice! But a
strong mystic belief in the vision that had ruled his life
held him back : he would not now, for a few weeks sooner
of human pleasures, strip his love of its crown, of the
glory that, like Dante's love for Beatrice, raised his be-
loved from earth above the seventh heaven and wove a
star-wrought halo round her head. Virginia had been the
keeper of his vision, and to her he must reveal its incarna-
tion, and he must crown her the queen over his spirit and
his art before he woo her with the words of the lover.

Therefore Peter stayed at home and spent his time as
he was wont to do in his vacations from school, long ago.
Though it was late in September, he still swam in the cold
sea and rowed against the strong wind, played tennis and

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roamed on the beach. Sometimes late in the afternoons
Dick would be his playfellow, as in the old boyhood days
— Dick, who had hailed him with a jovial:

"Hallo, old fellow ! I'm mighty glad to see you back !"

But although Dick was still the hearty, loyal comrade,
he was drawn more to his betrothed, the blonde, daintily-
insipid Elsie Robins, than to his old friends. Harold,
moreover, was still on his journey, and of his other school-
mates Peter saw little, as they were at their work during
the day, and the evenings he liked to spend reading in the
library with his father and mother. Mira Mare was closed
for the winter.

So the days passed tranquilly enough from without, but
within his heart there was a storm of impatience. At
last, in one morning's mail the letter came that announced
the acceptance of the "Red Poppies." Immediately he
wrote to Virginia, imploring her, for his sake, to arrange
her return so that she would be in Boston on the morn-
ing when the exhibition opened.

"How conceited she will think me !" Peter said to him-
self, as he sealed the letter, for he had not told her what
the picture was for which he was summoning her back.

But he felt confident that she would come: she must
come! There would be something awry with the world
if she did not heed his summons, and he would lose his
faith in its goodness.

And Virginia replied that she would come.

"Why didn't you let me know you were going home?*'
she wrote, and that query seemed to Peter a good token.
Her letter was brief, no doubt because she wanted to keep
her thoughts till they should meet again, and it was
enough to know that she was coming indeed. The ten

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days before the opening of the exhibition dragged on
wearily, and every night Peter went to bed with a sigh of
relief : "Now one day more has gone by !"

At last the day came. Peter was to call for Virginia at
the house of a friend in Boston, where she had spent the
night with her mother on her way home from the moun-
tains. He took an early train and read the newspaper on
the way in a strangely artificial calm of mind. It seemed
like a calm before a whirlwind. Then he went to the
house where Virginia was waiting for him, and the
strange calm began to be disturbed.

In a dark drawing-room with old furniture and dim
family pictures, Peter hearkened for Virginia's footsteps.
She was coming! . . . How would he find her? Would
she remember the strain between them in Munich? . . .
Would she be kind?

Virginia came in, pale, with a new transparent beauty,
and her dark eyes seemed to bum in their frail set-
ting.

"Oh, Virginia," cried Peter, "you look as if you had
been suffering."

Virginia shrugged her shoulders and laughed.

"Oh, I have only been suffering from a great ennui,"
she said. "But I think perhaps you can rescue me from
it. You have had so little cause for ennui in your life
over there !"

Was there a little malice in that utterance, an allusion,
perhaps, to the Carnival ball, or had she spoken in all
simplicity?

"I'll do my best to chase your ennui away," said Peter ;
"but you're doing this for me."

"What ?" asked Virginia. "What am I doing for you ?"

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"Going with me to the exhibit," Peter replied. "That
means more to me than you can guess."

"I wonder what the picture will be," she said; "I've
been wondering all the way on the train. Is it one of
those I saw in Munich?"

"No !" exclaimed Peter. "Do you think I would call you
for those? No, I painted it since I saw you last."

"Oh, let's go right away," cried Virginia. "I'm grow-
ing impatient."

She had her hat and coat on already, so they went out
and walked to the gallery in the crisp late September air.
Carelessly, easily Peter talked with Virginia, told her
about his journey with Atherton, listened to her plaintive
and mocking account of her dreary summer — ^not at all as
if he were approaching the moment for which he had been
waiting all his life.

"Now I am curious!" whispered Virginia, as they
walked up the stairs to the gallery.

Gloomy doubts plucked at Peter's heart as the moment
drew near. As one of the exhibitors, Peter had the right
to enter the gallery half an hour before the official open-
ing, so they met no other visitors.

They stepped into the main exhibition hall and Peter
looked about him, but his own picture he could not see.
This disappointment in the first minute gave him a pang,
but he led Virginia silently into a small intimate room.
There, on the short wall, alone by itself, gleamed the
"Red Poppies."

Virginia stopped short and turned quite pale. She
staggered, as if she had suddenly grown dizzy.

"The vision !" she gasped.

"It seems to frighten you," said Peter.

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"Oh, it's too wonderful !" she cried. "I can't believe it's
true. I feel quite faint from too much joy. I can't grasp
that I'm seeing our vision with my own mortal eyes."

These eyes were now glistening with tears although
they had been glowing with ardor, as if dew had fallen
on fire.

"Our vision !" cried Peter, eagerly. "You have said
It: our vision! You kept the vision clear for me — you
are the real painter of this picture!"

Virginia was speechless and trembled.

"I love you !" whispered Peter, and when her eyes lit
up through her tears, he drew her into his arms there,
by the jubilant glow of the "Red Poppies."

It was a long time before they spoke again.

"You have to be willing to marry an artist, Virginia !"
said Peter gaily.

"I know !" said Virginia, with a mock-sigh. "What a
wild, capricious life I shall have to lead ! But, you know,"
she began gravely, "father^s consent ... it won't be
easy to get that. I'm not worrying about mother's ; she
always loved you, ever since you were a little boy. But
father never knew you so well, and, you know, artists
don't seem like real people to him."

That was grave ! The old blind view that had blotted his
joy at home, that had never thrown a shadow across his
path abroad, was now looming up between him and his
love! But what did that matter? As long as Virginia
saw with clear eyes, her father might stay blind !

"If you are willing," he said, "what else matters in the
wide world?"

Virginia hung her head.

"It does matter some," she said. "I want everybody to

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envy me and I want my father to be proud .... Wait !"
she started with a quick gleam in her eyes. "I know what
we'll do : let father see these *Red Poppies/ and then he
must be proud !"

Peter laughed.

"If a man thinks a painter is a crank," he said, "he
will think so whatever the crank has painted."

"No, no," said Virginia, earnestly. "It can't be so.
. . . And besides, I always wanted a secret engagement.
Let's keep this secret until father has been here. You, too.
And I'll have to tell father in a perfectly casual way to go
and look at Peter's excellent new picture, and it may be
many days before he'll take the time to indulge in picture
seeing. . . . Then we'll keep our secret all the longer !"

"I love a secret engagement, too," said Peter. "Why,
Virginia, we've been secretly betrothed ever since I
first saw you standing there among the red poppies!
Only it was so secret that we didn't know about it our-
selves !"

Virginia laughed and Peter laughed, and they were like
happy children.

"Hush!" said Virginia, when Peter was beginning to
lay his arm round her shoulders. "Don't — ^people are
coming in!"

"Bother people !" cried Peter, and drew Virginia to a
seat in the comer.

"It's for them you painted the poppies," she said,
demurely.

"No, I painted them for you," said Peter.

"Oh, listen to what they're saying !" Virginia exclaimed,
glancing at the group of visitors in front of the picture.

Peter was too happy in this moment to heed anything

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besides his love, but because Virginia wished it, he lis-
tened to the remarks of the strangers.

"Oh look, May !" said a pale, elderly woman, in black,
to a young girl. "Poppies! Doesn't that just suck the
soul out of your body !"

"Oh, I should say!" cried the girl. "I like this best-
all those in the other room aren't worth one of these pop-
pies!"

"Look, here !" said a fashionable woman, who eyed the
picture with her lorgnette, to her escort. "This has dis-
tinction. Whose is it? Look in the catalogue ^'

"Loring !" replied her companion .

"Peter Loring — oh, yes!" exclaimed the lady. "He
painted Mrs. Montague's portrait and Mrs. Odiorne's.
. . . But I didn't know he did this sort of thing! There's
something big about this !" .

A reporter, who was jotting down notes as he passed
from picture to picture, lingered a long while in front of
the "Red Poppies," then bent vigorously over his notebook
and did not raise his head for some time.

"How they're all impressed by it !" whispered Virginia.
"Peter, I'm proud of you."

Peter shrugged his shoulder.

"Wait for the press !" he said, with affected doubt, but
Virginia answered :

"You silly boy ! You know you'll be praised to the sky.
That reporter over there is making up a long story — ^he
thinks he has discovered you."

While visitors came and went, Peter and Virginia
talked with as much ease and cheer as if they were at
home.

In their youthful egotism they barely looked at the

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other pictures in the gallery on their way out, and when
they left the building, Peter felt as if they were leaving a
temple consecrated to his love. When they were back in
the house where Virginia was visiting, her mother, the
beautiful lady of the garden, came to meet them. Her
beauty was now at its height, the faultless aristocratic face
crowned by silver hair, and the gray eyes more than ever
lucid, like the sea.

"Mother," said Virginia, "you must go this minute and
see Peter's new masterpiece. They are all praising it — ^I
prophesy you'll be enchanted."

"What is the subject of the picture?" asked Mrs. Grey.

"*Red Poppies,'" answered Virginia.

"The red poppies of your grandmother's garden?" said
the beautiful lady.

"How does mother know?" cried Virginia, astonished.

"Oh, before you were old enough to care," said
Virginia's mother, "Peter told me and Mr. Atherton
what he liked best in the world, and it was *red
poppies.' "

"You traitor !" cried Virginia gaily. "You should have
told me."

They glanced at each other meaningly, as sharers of a
happy secret. Unwillingly, Peter parted from his
betrothed for two days without even a parting kiss, be-
cause Virginia's mother innocently stayed with them to
the last. On his homeward journey, Peter lived the
morning over again, minute by minute, and he was angry
when the train stopped and cut short the beguiling pro-
cession of his memories.

At home, Peter's mother came down the street to
meet him, and with curiosity more eager than any that

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she had ever bestowed on former steps in his career,
she asked:
"How are people liking the 'Red Poppies' ? Is it hung

weur

As Peter, bound to secrecy, could not tell the whole
truth, he could not tell the half truth with much ardor,
for the "Red Poppies" without Virginia's love had little
significance for him on this day of days. So he told his
mother merely that the picture was hung well indeed, and
that it seemed to be liked.

"Father and I want to go in tomorrow and see it hang-
ing there," she said, with enthusiasm. "I shall almost
hate to have everybody look at your grandmother's dear
old garden ; jt seems as if it were my very own — ^not like
any of your other pictures. And just think, if some rich
stranger buys it and hangs it in a parlor where nobody will
know what it means to me *'

"Oh, mother," said Peter, "just because I felt the same
way about it, I set such an impertinently high price on
it that somebody will have to like it terribly much to
buy it."

The newly aroused enthusiasm of his father and mother
enhanced the otherwise dreary waiting for Virginia's re-
turn. Besides, there were the criticisms of his picture in
the newspapers. The next morning, with hope and mis-
givings both in his heart, Peter snatched three different
Boston papers from the newsboy who was passing by his
house, and in the solitude of his room looked for the dis-
creet comers where news was given to art-lovers.

"Has America Found Her True Spokesman in Art ?"
the headlines in one paper caught Peter's eye, and he
read on:

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Not only this dty, but the whole country can congratulate itself
on the possession of a new treasure: the painting " Red Poppies"
by Peter Loring, a young New England artist, hitherto kno?ni
only as a fashionable portrait painter of little true distinction.
This picture is not only an excellent work of art, but it breathes
a spirit of youthful optimism that few of the jaded artists of the
old world can acquire. Moreover, its message of light and joy
cannot fail to appeal to the imschooled as well as the schooled
observer. We should welcome Mr. Loring as the true American
painter.

This was signed with the initials J. 'A., of a well-known
critic, and the other papers praised Peter's work in a simi-
lar strain.

"Peter !" his mother cried from downstairs. "Come and
see what the paper says about your picture!"

"I've got ahead of you!" Peter cried, and ran down-
stairs waving his newspapers.

In the dining-room he found his father and mother both
bending over the same morning paper that his father held
spread out, reading with eager faces.

"Oh, I'm prouder of winning father than of winning J.
'A. !" exclaimed Peter, when he saw the luster of satisfac-
tion in his father's eyes.

"I think we shall have a famous son," said Peter's
mother. "Just think ! I shall feel so queer when I go to
the exhibition and hear strangers praise Peter's work."

"You'll feel still queerer when they don't praise it," said
Peter. "And I'm not famous yet, just because of J. A."

In the course of the day, however, Peter began to feel
that he was at least a public character, for reporters from
Boston were asking him over the long-distance telephone
for the facts of his career and his opinions on art in gen-

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eral. When Peter had been a portrait painter under the
patronizing wings of Mrs. Montague, the press and the
public at large had left him well in peace ; therefore his
publicity was a novel excitement. One reporter was com-
ing to interview him tonight, with the train that arrived
at eight

As his father and mother planned to return from their
day in Boston on a later train, Peter sat alone on the
porch, smoking, wrapt in absorbing thoughts of Virginia
and a radiant future, when a tall, gaunt young man came
sauntering down the street, and then skipped up the piazza
steps.

"Mr. Loring," he said, "I'm from the Herald."

"Oh yes !" said Peter, and as the air was growing chilly^
led the reporter into the library.

When the lamplight fell on the newcomer's face, Peter
stared at him and cried out:

"Red Mike— I declarer

"I wondered if you'd know me!" laughed Peter's old
schoolmate. "I've changed a lot since schooldays — grown
thinner — eh? But you haven't changed much, old chap,
and look at you — famous; and me, poor devil, coming
here to get an interview."

"I thought you had gone into fire insurance," said Peter,
with compassion for the haggardness of Red Mike's
Sfreckled face.

"The place bust up," was the reply. "Then I hung
round for a time and couldn't find what I wanted.
Guess I was a square peg in many round holes. I lost
faith in business then, and went into journalism. Here
lam "

"This is too funny !" exclaimed Peter, "that you should

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be interviewing me. I don't remember that you had any-
leaning toward art/'

"This isn't art news, mind you ! This is miscellaneous
news about people in the limelight. You're famous, man !
And let me tell you, Peter" — ^Red Mike lowered his rough
voice — ^*'when they told me I'd got to look at a famous
new picture, and then go and talk to the painter Loring
about it, I said to myself : 'Hang it ! Nobody ever dragged
me to an art exhibit yet, even if I did go to school with the
artist' But I had to go and — ^I tell you, I was never so—
I — ^I was mighty glad I went. I never thought I'd like a
work of art, but I tell you, Peter, when I looked at those
red poppies, they made me downright happy, and I said ta
myself : 'There's something in it, after all.' "

Peter shook hands with Red Mike heartily.

"I'm glad of that," he said. "I like your judgment bet-
ter than all J. A.'s high-fluting eulogies — ^though they
pleased me well enough."

"Well, Mr. Loring," said the reporter, a little embar*
rassed, "let's come to business. I suppose you were bom
in this charming town ?"

The interview soon lapsed back into friendly conversa-
tion, and lasted till Peter's father and mother returned.
Red Mike ran for the eleven o'clock train, and Peter,
after listening to his mother's glowing account of the
crowds in front of his picture, went to sleep blissfully oa
his laurels.

In the morning early he woke up with the exhilarated
sense of his beloved's near homecoming. At noon he
met her and Mrs. Grey at the station, and Virginia's first
words, when she had barely stepped down from the train^
were:

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"Peter, did you know you were famous?"

She was in high spirits, and her pallor had given way
to a healthy glow.

"I'm going to make father go and see the picture to-
morrow," she said merrily ; "I'll tell him there is a lion
m Gullport."

"When shall I see you alone?" asked Peter, under his
breath, when Mrs. Grey was giving directions to the cab-
driver.

"Let's meet in Aunt Qarissa's garden, this afternoon —
say, at four — ^nobody will trouble us there."

Then Virginia drove off with her mother, and Peter
waited impatiently for the appointed hour in the after-
noon, when he slipped unannounced into Miss Qarissa's
garden and waited hidden in the bower. Only the sturdy
purple and crimson asters and a few dahlias remained of
the garden's glory. But Peter thought of his last meeting
with Virginia in this same garden when her displeasure
had sent him to Munich in pursuit of panache and the
first meeting here, when he had told her of his vision. A
long round-about way he had gone, indeed, to find his
bliss so near at home in Miss Clarissa's garden.

Why didn't Virginia come? It was five minutes past
four, and four was the appointed time. He left the bower
and watched by the gate. Virginia was not in sight, but a
great touring car was speeding down the road in a cloud
of dust. The car whizzed past him, but in the same mo-
ment the lady who sat in it alone, with her face hidden
by a bright green veil, raised her hand as if for a sign of
recognition toward Peter, then leaned over and spoke to
the chauffeur, who slowed down and rode back to the
garden gate.

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"Mr. Loring !" called a cool, clear voice that Peter had
not heard for over a year, and the green veil was lifted to
reveal the face of Mrs. Montague. Why must she come
now in this very hour of his first clandestine tryst with his
own betrothed ? Peter was vexed, but, nevertheless, there
was a certain pleasure in seeing Mrs. Montague again,
and he ran to the side of her car, where he stood talking
up to his patroness of days not very long gone by.

"I stopped at your house to congratulate you, and was
disappointed not to find you there," she said, with a cor-
diality that surprised Peter, because he had not written
her a line since his abrupt departure. "I saw your picture
and I was amazed. I always thought well of your art, as
you know, Mr. Loring, but somehow — even aside from
the subject — ^your style seemed quite different at the time
when you were painting my portrait here. There is some-
thing great, something fearlessly simple about these 'Red
Poppies* that I should not have expected from you. I am
afraid I never quite knew you, Mr. Loring."

She smiled hcfr old ironic siren's smile, but Peter today
felt easily proof against her beguilcment.

"We picture buyers," she went on, with a note of mys-
tery in her voice, "will have to turn our backs on the Euro-
pean market."

In that moment Virginia was coming toward them, and
the first look of disappointment in her eyes at sight of
Mrs. Montague turned into a roguish sparkle.

"How do you do, Virginia?" called the older woman
from her car. "How well you look ! I see the mountains
have done you good. What do you say to our young
friend's new distinction? Have you seen the famous [pic-
ture yet?"

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"Yes, I saw it the first day," Virginia said, de-
murely, while her eyes danced with merriment. "I like
it, too."

"I congratulate myself," said Mrs. Montague, "on hav-
ing my portrait painted by such a great man. What are
your plans for the winter?"

"I have not made any definite ones yet," said Peter,
with a sly glance at Virginia, "but I shall stay at home for
a while."

"Perhaps you'll come and visit me in Boston for a
week or so when things are in full swing," said Mrs. Mon-
tague. "I want to hear about your life in Munich and
your journey with Atherton. He is back, now, by the
' way, did you know ?"

"No, I didn't know. Thank you very much for asking
me — ^thank you very much," he responded, with vag^e ef-
fusiveness.

Finally she turned to Virginia and inquired after Mrs.
Grey, then made a sign to her chauffeur, and after shak-
ing hands briskly with both, let down her bright green
veil and rode away.

"Oh, Virginia!" said Peter, when the intruder was
gone, " a rather terrifying thought has come to me : Mrs.
Montague spoke so mysteriously in a way that makes me
think that she might possibly buy the 'Red Poppies,' and
I don't like to think of our vision as a decoration of
Mira Mare."

"No," said Virginia, gravely, "that would make me sad.
Yet I could look at the 'Red Poppies' then — ^but suppose
they should hang in some strange house out West . . .
I don't want to think of a single mournful thought today,
though ; I don't want to think about father and how long

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THE "RED POPPIES"

he will delay going to the exhibition — I only want to think
that we're engaged '^

"And that we're all alone in Aunt Clarissa's gar-
den," said Peter, as he drew her by the hand into the
bower.

"Guess what has happened !" cried Virginia,

"Something good," said Peter; "nothing sad is ad-
mitted."

"I can sing again !" she declared, exultantly. "I went
to see my teacher this morning and she said I sang better
than ever before. And in the summer I had almost given
it up. Just think, how useful love can be!"

"I think I proved that, too," said Peter, proudly. "But
do sing to me now, can't you?"

"We can slip into the parlor," she replied. "Aunt Oar-
issa stays upstairs in the afternoons, over on the other side
of the house. Come, and I'll sing to you !"

By a side door from the piazza they walked into Miss
Clarissa's low, dark parlor with the lavender brocade sofa
and chairs, the cabinet with curios of old days, the clavi-
chord and the grand piano.

"What shall I sing?" asked Virginia, letting her hands
wander freely over the keys.

"That song with strange words," said Peter, "that Ital-
ian song you sang once at Mrs. Montague's "

"And that I refused to sing when you made me angry,**
said Virginia.

And she sang the miraculous song that had once con-
jured up his vision and that seemed now a song of
triumph. Her voice was stronger and even more lucid
now, and the sound of it made Peter happy like the sight
of a bright dear color.

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RED POPPIES

In the midst of one song Virginia broke off suddenly,
and stared wistfully out of the window.

"What is it?" asked Peter, alarmed.

"If only father will like the 'Red Poppies !' " she sighed.

"I thought you had banished all mournful thoughts,"
Peter replied; "and, besides, even if he doesn't, that
couldn't alter an)rthing between us. He wouldn't want to
make you suflFer."

"No, he would yield finally," said Virginia; "but I
don't want to beg for you. I want to present you to my
family as a gift of honor. And now I'll have to go and
meet father."

"I shall be glad when this secreqr is over," said Peter.
"After all, I had rather not hide my love as if it were
afraid of the daylight."

"Oh, just a little more patience !" cried Virginia. "And
you can just happen to call on me tonight — Mrs. Mon-
tague has sped out of Gullport," she added, mischievously.
"So we shall be safe from intruders."

Mrs. Montague, indeed! On his reluctant way home
Peter could not help seeing his *Red Poppies' hanging
over the mantlepiece in the reception hall of Mira Mare,
and even the happy evening at Virginia's house could not
chase away this phantom idea. In his sleep he had a
nightmare of a party at Mrs. Montague's, during which
the men threw the ashes from their cigars at the "Red
Poppies."

Still a bit delirious from his dreams, Peter went with
odd misgivings down to the breakfast table, where his
mail was lying. Nervously he looked for an envelope
in Mrs. Montague's large dashing hand, and to his
relief did not find it There was, however, a letter from

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THE "RED POPPIES"

the Studio Club which he opened anxiously : this must be
the announcement that Mrs. Montague had bought his
picture. His spirits grew faint. . . .

Oh, wonder of wonders! Was he reading real t3rpe-
written words or was this one of the dreams of his rest-
less night? The Boston Art Museum had bought the
"Red Poppies"!

With the letter in his hand he ran, hatless and wildly,
like a schoolboy, to Virginia's house.

"Miss Virginia isn't down yet !" said the startled maid.

"Tell her I have something important to tell her," said
Peter. "I'll wait."

After a few minutes, Virginia glided into the room in
a kimono of shining red silk, her long, dark hair tied back
with a ribbon.

"What is the matter?'* she gasped, with alarm in her
wide-open eyes.

"The Art Museum has bought the 'Red Poppies!' '* he
announced exultantly, and showed her the letter.

"Oh, Peter!" cried Virginia, clapping her hands and
dancing about the room. "Oh, how happy I am! Our
blessed vision won't be a parlor decoration, after all !"

"I was sure Mrs. Montague had bought it yesterday,"
said Peter. "She looked so dangerous — and now !"

Virginia slipped her arm through his and playfully laid
her head on his shoulder.

"Just think," she mused; "now all the sad and tired
people can go and see our vision and for an hour forget
their burdens, and in winter some poor, shivering crea-
ture will leave his garret and warm his heart by the glow
of the poppies, and children and happy lovers like us will
pour their own joy into the great world-joy of which the

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RED POPPIES

*Red Poppies* are shouting. Our vision will be the vision
of many weary and broken souls — not only now, but in
many years to come — ^perhaps centuries . . ."

Peter stopped her outburst with a kiss.

"Oh, Peter V cried Virginia, and started when a rust-
ling soimded by the door. "Remember, we are still in
secret."

So Peter left the house and walked back as slowly and
dreamily as he had run thither wildly..

"How do you do, Mr. Loring!" a high, very sweet
voice roused him out of his reveries.

Peter turned round and saw standing at her garden
gate, with a bunch of purple asters in her hand, no one
less than Miss Fanny Rtmkle. Her hair, now gray, was
coiled up as fantastically as when Mrs. Montague had
first called her "queer," and she wore an orange-colored
dress.

"I hardly dare to speak to my one-time pupil," said
Peter's first teacher, with an engaging smile, "now that
he is famous."

"Oh, but I hope you will!" said Peter. "What bliss-
ful times I used to have in your house on rainy days!
You were always so patient"

"It's very sweet of you to say that," said Miss RunUe.
"I'm sure I have had cause to be proud. Do you know,
Mr. Loring" — she had stopped calling him Peter since he
came back from Paris — ^"my father has been visiting a
physician in Boston, and he said the family talked about
nothing but the epoch-making new picture all the evening.
Everybody is talking about it, they say, and even clergy-
men have mentioned it in their sermons as one of the
great spiritual achievements of our age. That must please

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your dear father. He didn't care so much about your art
when you were a little boy, but now he must be proud of
his great son."

Peter smiled helplessly at all this effusion, and all he
could think of saying was: "May I have an aster for
keepsake as a token of my first teacher's goodwill?*'

Thereupon the quaint lady blushed and presented him
with a purple aster as solemnly as if she were performing
a ritual. And Peter tore himself away to announce his
latest triumph at home.

During the two weeks that followed, Peter felt that his
cup of joy was so brimful that one more drop would
make it overflow. Artists' societies invited him as their
guest of honor; the hostesses whose favor he used to
court, now sought him as a lion ; editorials about the great
American painter appeared in leading newspapers and re-
prints of the "Red Poppies" without their red took up
whole pages of Sunday editions. And with his own eyes
Peter could see in the gallery how the people flocked to
his picture.

"Don't let your head get turned," Mr. Woodfin had
said to him one day in front of the hermitage. "Remem-
ber that no matter how many admirers you have, enemies
will always spring up, too."

This advice from the wild man of the woods, who had
known little praise and much bitterness in his life, Peter
kept as a kind of "memento more" to his joy in triumph.

But any check to his exuberance of spirits was of little
avail while Virginia's love chased every shadow in his
mind away. Only the secrecy of their bond made him im-
patient, because he would have liked to proclaim his en-

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gagement with pride, and marry soon. In his own native
town he wanted to plant his new home, in some little
house with a garden by the sea, as his desires for fashion,
for Boheme and for solitude had been stilled, and he
ielt that now the time had come when he could draw;
strength from his native soil.

Peter and Virginia were musing about their future on
her porch one cool, golden October afternoon, when Vir-
ginia's father came up the piazza steps, and abruptly they
broke oflF their secret conversation.

"Peter," said Mr. Grey, in his deliberate, stately man-
ner, "I want to shake hands with you."

Peter rose and shook hands obediently with Virginia's
father, who now drew up a chair and sat down with them.
What was coming?

"Do you know what I thought when I saw your *Red
Poppies?' " began Mr. Grey — ^he had seen the picture, and
Peter's heart stopped beating in his suspense — "I repented
that I had not been to see a picture gallery for six years ; I
repented that we have to go abroad to breathe an atmos-
phere that makes us respect beautiful things, when there
IS beauty enough in our nearest neighborhood, if we only
find someone to open our eyes. You are opening many
eyes in these days, Peter, and the people whom you are
teaching to see will be happier for it."

"Oh, do you really — " Peter began, but Mr. Grey
interrupted him.

"Then I thought another thing," continued Virginia's
father. "We let our wives and daughters enjoy these
beautiful things and bring up our sons to indiflFerence.
Why deprive them of the best? And one thing more I
thought— only for a moment, to be sure, but I thought it.

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just the same — ^namely, that if I could paint a picture like
the 'Red Poppies,' I should give up my mills and paint for
the rest of my days."

"You don't need to give up your mills, father !" cried
Virginia, jumping up, all flushed and trembling; "you can
give up something else."

"What do you mean ?" asked her father.

"Your daughter!" she cried, and Peter, as excited as
his beloved, said eagerly and swiftly, as if in one breath :

"I want to marry Virginia — she has consented — ^we've
only been waiting for your blessing."

Virginia's father tortured them with suspense as he
looked from Peter to Virginia and back at Peter with a
keen, sarcastic glance.

"I saw it would happen sooner or later," he said, slowly.
"And I must say, I was afraid of it. A painter as son
was not always my ideal. ... But, now *'

"But now you've changed your ideal !" cried Virginia,
clapping her hands in an ecstasy of glee. "Peter, wasn't I
right? It's because he has seen the 'Red Poppies!' I'll
call mother now. Come in, come in, both, and let's cele-
brate!"

And in the seclusion of the music-room Peter received
the consecrating kiss of the beautiful lady of the gar-
den.

"I adored you first of all," he said, touched with the
awe of her beauty that he had felt in childhood. "Ever
since the day I saw the red poppies."

"And I loved you, Peter, long before Virginia loved you
and wished you were my son," replied Virginia's mother.

There was much rejoicing in Virginia's house, but even
more in the parsonage, except that Peter's mother was a

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little sorry because her boy was passing into another
woman's care.

"But I'm glad it's Virginia of aU," she said. "I was
afraid you might pick up somebody abroad."

An hour later, when Peter and Virginia were studying
a calendar in the library to choose their wedding day,
Lizzy broke into their seclusion and handed Peter a cable-
gram. He tore it open and read aloud :

Hall to the great American painter. Jack-C6dle.

"Oh !" cried Virginia, "your fame has been cabled to
the papers abroad ! Jack is Jack Woodfin, I suppose ; but
whoisCecile?"

"Do you remember the Carnival ball in Munich?"
asked Peter, mischievously.

"Is she one of those masked ladies with whom you
danced like a madman at that wild nightmare ball ?"

"No, I didn't dance with her, but she was there," said
Peter, placidly, "and she was ordained for Jack, even as
you were ordained for me."

"I don't suppose you thought that in Munich, though,"
said Virginia, with a slight tremor in her voice.

"That is gone by now," said Peter, "and it seems years
and years ago !"

A shadow had fallen on Virginia's bright face, and to
dispel it, Peter said :

"Now, how are we going to celebrate our open en-
gagement? What should you like to do?"

"I tell you what I want to do," said Virginia, and her
face brightened again. "I want to go to the exhibition
with you tomorrow morning, all alone, as we did the first
day that the 'Red Poppies' were hung."

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THE "RED POPPIES"

"That's simple/' said Peter. "We'll take the nine
o'clock train tomorrow together."

So the next morning Peter and Virginia escaped the
friendly felicitations of the town, where their happy neiys
had spread swiftly, and rode to Boston. Though it was
morning, a throng was already flocking to the gallery and
the cluster of gazers in front of the "Red Poppies" was
so thick that Peter and Virginia felt shut out from the
picture that really belonged to them. But they rested on
the seat in the corner and again talked as easily as if they
were in Aunt Clarissa's bower, for it seemed to Peter that
here, within the light of his vision, was his right trysting-
place.

"Look !" cried Virginia suddenly, in the midst of their
cheerful discourse. "There is Atherton — ^I haven't seen
him since Munich."

To be sure, a little apart from the group about Peter's
picture, with a serene and pleased smile on his lips, stood
the philosopher. When he turned round and saw Peter
and Virginia, he barely raised his eyebrows in surprise
and came to shake hands with them in a more hearty
manner than was his wont.

"Peter, you have found yourself," he declared. "I con-
gratulate you and this country. This is no slavish imi-
tation of European schools. This is an interpretation of
the best, the most optimistic in American life."

"It seems strange to hear that from you," said Peter.
"I was afraid you would find it too simple, too optimistic,
in fact "

"I told you," said the philosopher, with an enigmatic
smile, "that you would outgrow me, too. You have
thrown oflF the inertia of the pessimism that I cast over

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you, and you have emerged in health and have done a
great work of fearless beauty."

**Even my father was impressed with it/' said Vir-
ginia. "For the first time by a painting !"

"And my own father — "said Peter. "What do you
suppose he called it? Nothing less than a psalm of
praise."

"You see," said Atherton. "The man of affairs has
stopped on his way to the market and has let a seer say
to him : 'Behold, this is your dream, the beauty and the
joy that you have buried in your heart since childhood,
and that ha? been choked by the weeds of care!' And
the Puritan has raised his eyes from the printed page and
has seen spirit uttered in color — even in the brightest
red."

"Oh, how true that is !" cried Virginia, while Peter was
speechless with joy.

"I am glad," Atherton went on, in his light accent, "that
the Art Museum was ahead of our friend Mrs. Montague,
who, by the way, was severely disappointed that your
painting can't hang in her drawing-room!"

He passed on to look at the other paintings, and left
Peter and Virginia glaring at each other in silence. The
group in front of Peter's picture had dispersed somewhat
so that they could see the jubilant gleam of the red pop-
pies and the golden-haired child all in the sunlight's
glory.

"Do you suppose Atherton ever had a vision, too?"
asked Virginia.

"No," said Peter. "His mind is always floating on a
calm pool of beauty. But we who set out in pursuit of our
visions have a stormy time and would be shipwrecked if it

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weren't for pilots who point out the way. If you had
not been my pilot, Virginia, I never should have reached
my vision at all. My vision — Oh, first it grew pale and
then it was tainted and then it had fled altogether. And
you have brought it back."

"I shouldn't believe that,*' said Virginia. "But I sup-
pose I must believe it, because I see them gleaming right
there before me : our 'Red Poppies' !'*

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