t across the studio, he
cried out, again, "Don't move, please don't move!" and began working. He
was as one beside himself, so wholly absorbed was he in translating into
the terms of color and line, the loveliness purity and truth that was
expressed by the personality of the girl as she stood among the flowers.
"If I can get it! If I can only get it!" he exclaimed again and again,
with a kind of savage earnestness, as he worked.

All his years of careful training, all his studiously acquired skill, all
his mastery of the mechanics of his craft, came to him, now, without
conscious effort--obedient to his purpose. Here was no thoughtful
straining to remember the laws of composition, and perspective, and
harmony. Here was no skillful evading of the truth he saw. So freely, so
surely, he worked, he scarcely knew he painted. Forgetting self, as he was
unconscious of his technic, he worked as the birds sing, as the bees toil,
as the deer runs. Under his hand, his picture grew and blossomed as the
roses, themselves, among which the beautiful girl stood.

Day after day, at that same hour, Sibyl Andres came singing through the
orange grove, to stand in the golden sunlight among the roses, with hands
outstretched in greeting. Every day, Aaron King waited her coming--sitting
before his easel, palette and brush in hand. Each day, he worked as he had
worked that first day--with no thought for anything save for his picture.

In the mornings, he walked with Conrad Lagrange or, sometimes, worked with
Sibyl in the garden. Often, in the evening, the two men would visit the
little house next door. Occasionally, the girl and the woman with the
disfigured face would come to sit for a while on the front porch with
their friends. Thus the neighborly friendship that began in the hills was
continued in the orange groves. The comradeship between the two young
people grew stronger, hour by hour, as the painter worked at his easel to
express with canvas and color and brush the spirit of the girl whose
character and life was so unmarred by the world.

A11 through those days, when he was so absorbed in his work that he often
failed to reply when she spoke to him, the girl manifested a helpful
understanding of his mood that caused the painter to marvel. She seemed to
know, instinctively, when he was baffled or perplexed by the annoying
devils of "can't-get-at-it," that so delight to torment artist folk; just
as she knew and rejoiced when the imps w