her raised, gleeful tone, as she said some funny, quick,
shrewd thing in her original fashion to her aunt.

Through the month of August, while work was slack, and the Hewland
family was away travelling, and other lodgers' rooms were vacated,
the Brees had been more at home, and Morris Hewland had been more in
his rooms above, than had been usual at most times. The music
mistress had taken a vacation, and gone into the country; only old
Mr. Sparrow, lame with one weak ankle, hopped up and down; and the
spare, odd-faced landlady glided about the passages with her prim
profile always in the same pose, reminding one of a badly-made
rag-doll, of which the nose, chin, and chest are in one invincible
flat line, interrupted feebly by an unsuccessful hint of drawing in
at the throat.

Mr. Hewland liked June for his travels; and July and August, when
everybody was out of the way, for his quiet summer work.

The Hewlands called him odd, and let him go; he stayed at home
sometimes, and he happened in and out, they knew where to find him,
and there was "no harm in Morris but his artistic peculiarities."

He had secured in these out-of-the way-lodgings in Leicester Place,
one of the best north lights that could be had in the city; he would
not take a room among a lot of others in a Studio Building. So he
worked up his studies, painted his pictures, let nobody come near
him except as he chose to bring them, and when he wanted anything of
the world, went out into the world and got it.

Now, something had come right in here close to him, which brought
him a certain sense of such a world as he could not go out into at
will, to get what he wanted. A world of simplicities, of blessed
contents, of unworn, joyous impulses, of little new, unceasing
spontaneities; a world that he looked into, as we used to do at
Sattler's Cosmoramas, through the merest peepholes, and comprehended
by the merest hints; but which the presence of this girl under the
roof with himself as surely revealed to him as the wind-flower
reveals the spring.

On her part, Bel Bree got a glimpse, she knew not how, of a world
above and beyond her own; a world of beauty, of power, of reach and
elevation, in which people like Morris Hewland dwelt. His step, his
voice, his words now and then to the friend or two whom he had the
habit of bringing in with him,--the mere knowledge that he "made
pictures," such pictures as she looked at in the windows and in
art-dealers' room