loves, which she had
slipped on before they started, clasped in her lap, she talked to
Fairfax. By the time the tram stopped before the Palace of Versailles,
he had heard her story. She was the daughter of an Irish clergyman. Nora
Scarlet was her name.

Nora and Molly!

But they were very different. This girl was as gay as a lark. She
laughed frankly aloud, musically, and put her hand on his with a free
"camaraderie." She made sparkling little faces at him and called him
softly, "Ami."

"My name is Nora, Nora Scarlet, but I don't want you to tell me your
name until the end of the day, please. It is just a silly idea, but I
will call you 'Ami.' I daresay it is a great name you have got, and I
would rather feel that I don't want to know it too soon."

She had shown talent in the school where she had started in Ireland, and
had taken a scholarship and had come to Paris to study, to venture
unprepared and quite wildly into the student life, to struggle on small
means and insufficient food uphill toward art. She displayed in talking
a touching confidence in herself and worship of beauty, as well as a
simple and loyal attitude toward life in general. She occupied a
furnished room near the studio and, as she expressed it, "fished for
herself." She was the oldest of seven children, with a weight of
responsibility on herself. Her father's salary was ridiculous, she told
him, not enough to bring up one hungry child well, much less half a
dozen.

"I thought that I could support myself with my art," she told Fairfax,
"and that I should soon be _arrivee, lancee_, but to-day, when the
criticism discouraged me and I knew that I should have to write home for
money soon, well ... I'd not like to tell you what strange fancies
came." She lifted up her finger and pointed at the river as it lay
between its shores. "And now," she glanced at him, "when you tell me,
too, that I am no good at painting!"

"I haven't said that," remonstrated Fairfax; "but don't let's talk about
work now, what do you say? Let's have a holiday."

They walked up the Palace over the cobbles of the courtyard and paused
to look back at the Route de Paris, that Miss Nora Scarlet might
thoroughly picture the procession of the fish-wives and the march of the
Paris populace up to Versailles, where the people swept its violent sea
over the royal courts and the foam rose to the windows where royal faces
whitened against the panes. Nora Scarlet and Fairfax wandered t