the wall, and stared at them while she ate her bread
and butter.

She felt nervous at the thought of letting anybody see them, and locked
them up in her desk before Miss Davis and the other girls came home.

In earliest dawn of the next morning, however, she was out of bed and
studying the drawings as she stood in her night-dress and with bare
feet. Were they really good, she asked herself, or were her eyes
bewitched; and would Mr. Enderby laugh at them if he saw them? Anguish
seized on her at the thought, and she dressed herself with trembling
hands. A new idea, striving in her mind, seemed to set all nature
thrilling with a meaning it had never borne for her before. There had
been great painters on the earth, as she knew full well, whose existence
had been made beautiful and glorious by their genius; and there were
artists living in the present day, small and great, who must surely be
the happiest beings in the world. Their days were spent, not in
drudgery, and lecturing, and primness, but in the study and reproduction
of the beauty lying round them. Oh, if God should have intended her to
be one of these!

When the maids came to dust the school-room they found Hetty hard at
work upon a new wreath of ivy which she had hastily snatched from the
garden wall and hung against the curtain, and they thought she was
doing some penance at Miss Davis's bidding. By eight o'clock the
drawings were hid away, the flowers and wreaths disposed of in the jars,
and Hetty was sitting at the table with a book in her hand. No one need
know, she thought, of how she spent those early hours when everybody
else was in bed. And so day after day she worked on steadily with her
pencil, and there was a strange and unutterable hope in her heart, and a
new light of happiness in her eyes.

After some time she became more daring and attempted to bring colour
into her designs. Using her school-room box of paints, the paints
intended only for the drawing of maps, she placed washes of colour on
her leaves and along her stems, making the whole composition more
effective and complete. Day by day she improved on her first ideas, till
she had stored up a collection of really beautiful sketches.

With this new joy tingling through her young veins from morning till
night, and from night till morning again, Hetty began to look so glad
and bright that everyone remarked it. Miss Davis looked on approvingly,
thinking that her own excellent discipline of the