he hardly knew what ponderous
offer of aid. The Hicks munificence was too uncalculating not to be
occasionally oppressive. But looking at her again he saw that her eyes
were full of tears.

"I thought it was your vocation," she said.

"So did I. But life comes along, and upsets things."

"Oh, I understand. There may be things--worth giving up all other things
for."

"There are!" cried Nick with beaming emphasis.

He was conscious that Miss Hicks's eyes demanded of him even more than
this sweeping affirmation.

"But your novel may fail," she said with her odd harshness.

"It may--it probably will," he agreed. "But if one stopped to consider
such possibilities--"

"Don't you have to, with a wife?"

"Oh, my dear Coral--how old are you? Not twenty?" he questioned, laying
a brotherly hand on hers.

She stared at him a moment, and sprang up clumsily from her chair. "I
was never young... if that's what you mean. It's lucky, isn't it, that
my parents gave me such a grand education? Because, you see, art's a
wonderful resource." (She pronounced it RE-source.)

He continued to look at her kindly. "You won't need it--or any
other--when you grow young, as you will some day," he assured her.

"Do you mean, when I fall in love? But I am in love--Oh, there's
Eldorada and Mr. Beck!" She broke off with a jerk, signalling with her
field-glass to the pair who had just appeared at the farther end of the
nave. "I told them that if they'd meet me here to-day I'd try to make
them understand Tiepolo. Because, you see, at home we never really
have understood Tiepolo; and Mr. Beck and Eldorada are the only ones to
realize it. Mr. Buttles simply won't." She turned to Lansing and held
out her hand. "I am in love," she repeated earnestly, "and that's the
reason why I find art such a RE source."

She restored her eye-glasses, opened her manual, and strode across the
church to the expectant neophytes.

Lansing, looking after her, wondered for half a moment whether Mr. Beck
were the object of this apparently unrequited sentiment; then, with a
queer start of introspection, abruptly decided that, no, he certainly
was not. But then--but then--. Well, there was no use in following up
such conjectures.... He turned home-ward, wondering if the picnickers
had already reached Palazzo Vanderlyn.

They got back only in time for a late dinner, full of chaff and
laughter, and apparently still enchanted with each other's society.
Nelson Vanderl