about that Indian that you want commemorated in bronze up
there on the bluff. Do you think he was cruel?"

"Who knows? He was, perhaps, a savage. Yet he may have been
tender-hearted. I hope so, if he is going to be fixed in bronze for the
ages to stare at."

"Did you," Becky asked, deliberately, "ever want to tie a man to a stake
and build a fire under him?"

He turned and stared at her. "My dear child, what ever put such an idea
in your head?"

"Well, did you?"

He considered it. "There was a time in France when I wanted to do worse
than that."

"But that was war."

"No, it was a brute in my own company. He broke the heart of a little
girl that he met in Brittany. He--he--well he murdered her--dreams."

"Perhaps he didn't know what he was doing."

"He knew. Every man knows."

"And you wanted to make him--suffer----"

"Yes."

She shivered. "Are all men like that?"

"Like what?"

"Cruel."

"It can't be cruelty. It's a sense of justice."

"I hope it is." She kept thinking about George rising dank and dripping
from the fountain. She hated to think about it.

So she changed the subject. "I thought you were painting."

"I was. But the moor is fickle. Yesterday she billowed towards the
south, all gray and blue. And last night the storm spoiled it; she is
gorgeous and gay to-day, and I don't like her."

"Oh, why not?"

"She is too obvious. Anybody can paint a Persian carpet, but one can't
put soul into a--carpet----"

He was petulant. "I shall never paint the pictures I want to paint. Life
is too short."

"Life isn't short. Look at Grandfather. You will have forty years yet in
which to paint."

And now it was he who changed the subject, quickly, as if he were afraid
of it.

"My sister is coming to-morrow. I rather think you will like her."

"Will she like me, that's more important."

"She will love you, as I do, as everybody does, Becky."

They had reached that point in ten days that he could say such things to
her and win her smile. She did not believe in the least that he loved
her. He always laughed when he said it.

She liked him very much. She felt that the Admiral and Tristram and
Archibald Cope were all of them the best of comrades. Except for Jane,
she had had practically no feminine society since she came. And Jane was
not especially inspiring, not like Tristram, who seemed to carry one's
imagination back to Viking days.

Cope was immensely enthusiastic about Tristram. "If I co