nt recollection of beating so short a time ago,
and whom he had carefully avoided ever since.

"Hulloa!" said Betty, surprised into speaking to him.

Brown made a seat of his boot-heels and surveyed her, being much too
bashful to open up a conversation.

But Betty was not bashful.

"What are you doing?" she asked, and a very inquisitive face stared at
him from the depths of the pink sun-bonnet.

[Illustration: "'Is it a horse?' queried Betty."]

"H'm!" said John, and made a few more strokes with his pencil.

"Is it a horse?" queried Betty. "Yes it is--there are no horns, and it's
too big for a dog or cat. Yes, it's a horse."

"H'm!" said John again. Then he looked at his handiwork, drawing further
off to see it from Betty's point of view.

"Yes," he said, with badly concealed pride; "it's a horse right enough.
It's a race-horse. I drew him from memory."

"Why didn't you draw him on paper?" asked the small girl.

"Won't be let. And no sooner do I see a bit of blank wall than I begin
drawing something on it," said the reader of _Self-made Men_.

Betty only heeded the first part of his sentence.

"Who won't let you?" she asked, standing on one leg as she put the
question.

"My people," said John. "They don't want me to be an artist."

Betty's eyes rounded themselves.

"_Are_ you going to be an artist?" she asked. She was intensely
interested. The boys who played in her kingdom had not arrived at the
stage of thinking what they were going to be. What they were was
all-sufficient unto them. Cyril had once declared his intention of
keeping a sweets' shop, but that was quite a year ago now.

Betty had read many stories about artists, and they were always set in
romantic or tragic circumstances. The look she gave to the one before
her warmed him into becoming confidential on the spot. He did not tell
her all at once, not all even that first afternoon, although they took
the homeward way together.

But he gave her a rough outline of the lives of several artists who had
sprung from the ranks, and of one in particular who lived in a cellar,
and tasted of starvation as a boy; one who, denied paper, could not yet
deny the genius within him, but drew in coloured chalks upon any vacant
wall that came in his way. And he always drew animals--and usually
horses and dogs.

The little brown face under the sun-bonnet glowed with delight. Never
in all her life had the imaginative small maiden come across a boy like
th