acquaintanceship consequent on some months' residence
in the same house.

"Excellent! madam. Your features are the very thing--they are perfect."

"Really, Mr. Vanbrugh, you are very flattering," began the widow,
faintly colouring, and appealing to Olive, who looked delighted; for she
regarded the old artist with as much reverence as if he had been Michael
Angelo himself.

He interrupted them both. "Ay, that will just do;" and he drew in the
air some magic lines over Mrs. Rothesay's head. "Good brow--Greek mouth,
If, madam, you would favour me with taking off your cap. Thank you, Miss
Olive. _You_ understand me, I see. That will do--the white drapery over
the hair--ah, divine! My 'Alcestis' to the life! Madam--Mrs. Rothesay,
your head is glorious; it shall go down to posterity in my picture."

And he walked up and down the room, rubbing his hands with a delighted
pride, which, in its perfect simplicity, could never be confounded with
paltry vanity or self-esteem. "_My_ work, _my_ picture," in which he
so gloried, was utterly different from, "I, the man who executed it" He
worshipped--not himself at all; and scarcely so much his real painted
work, as the ideal which ever flitted before him, and which it was the
one great misery of his life never to have sufficiently attained.

"When shall I sit?" timidly inquired Mrs. Rothesay, still too much of a
woman not to be pleased by a painter's praise.

"At once, madam, at once, while the mood is on me. Miss Rothesay,
you will lead the way; you are not unacquainted with the arcana of my
studio." As, indeed, she was not, having before stood some three hours
in the painful attitude of a "Cassandra raving," while he painted from
her outstretched and very beautiful hands.

Happy she was the very moment her foot crossed the threshold of a
painter's studio, for Olive's love of Art had grown with her growth,
and strengthened with her strength. Moreover, the artistic atmosphere in
which she now lived had increased this passion tenfold.

"Truly, Miss Rothesay, you seem to know all about it," said Michael
Vanbrugh, when, in great pride and delight, she was helping him to
arrange her mother's pose, and at last became herself absorbed in
admiration of "Alcestis." "You might have been an artist's daughter or
sister."

"I wish I had been."

"My daughter is somewhat of an artist herself, Mr. Vanbrugh," observed
Mrs. Rothesay, with maternal pride; which Olive, deeply blushing, soon
q