r splendid Arthur.

If some gossip to whom she sighed and shook her head, and wondered what
could possibly ail Arthur--who still ate his dinner heartily, and had as
many orders for portraits as he cared to fulfill--suggested that there
was a woman in the case, good Aunt Winnifred smiled bland incredulity.

"Dear Mrs. Toxer, I should like to see that woman!"

Then she plied her knitting-needles nimbly, sighed, scratched her head
with a needle, counted her stitches, and said,

"Sometimes I can't but hope that it is concern of mind, without his
knowing it."

Mrs. Toxer also knitted, and scratched, and counted.

"No, ma'am; much more likely concern of heart with a full consciousness
of it. One, two, three--bless my soul! I'm always dropping a stitch."

Aunt Winnifred, who never dropped stitches, smiled pleasantly, and
answered,

"Yes, indeed, and this time you have dropped a very great one."

Meanwhile Arthur's great picture advanced rapidly. Diana, who had looked
only like a portrait of Hope Wayne looking out of a cloud, was now more
fully completed. She was still bending from the clouds indeed, but there
was more and more human softness in the face every time he touched it.
And lo! he had found at last Endymion. He lay upon a grassy knoll. Long
whispering tufts sighed around his head, which rested upon the very
summit of the mountain. There were no trees, no rocks. There was nothing
but the sleeping figure with the shepherd's crook by his side upon the
mountain top, all lying bare to the sky and to the eyes that looked from
the cloud, and from which all the moonlight of the picture fell.

When Lawrence Newt came into the studio one morning, Arthur, who worked
in secret upon his picture and never showed it, asked him if he would
like to look at it. The merchant said yes, and seated himself comfortably
in a large chair, while the artist brought the canvas from an inner room
and placed it before him. As he did so, Arthur stepped a little aside,
and watched him closely.

Lawrence Newt gazed for a long time and silently at the picture. As he
did so, his face rapidly donned its armor of inscrutability, and Arthur's
eyes attacked it in vain. Diana was clearly Hope Wayne. That he had seen
from the beginning. But Endymion was as clearly Lawrence Newt! He looked
steadily without turning his eyes, and after many minutes he said,
quietly,

"It is beautiful. It is triumphant. Endymion is a trifle too old,
perhaps. But Di