lle."

"Thank you," said Noel; "it was awfully interesting." And she walked
away. The sky had become full of clouds round the westerly sun; and
the foreign crinkled tracery of the plane-tree branches against that
French-grey, golden-edged mass, was very lovely. Beauty, and the
troubles of others, soothed her. She felt sorry for the painter, but
his eyes saw too much! And his words: "If ever you act differently
from others," made her feel him uncanny. Was it true that people
always disliked and condemned those who acted differently? If her old
school-fellows now knew what was before her, how would they treat her?
In her father's study hung a little reproduction of a tiny picture
in the Louvre, a "Rape of Europa," by an unknown painter--a humorous
delicate thing, of an enraptured; fair-haired girl mounted on a prancing
white bull, crossing a shallow stream, while on the bank all her white
girl-companions were gathered, turning half-sour, half-envious faces
away from that too-fearful spectacle, while one of them tried with timid
desperation to mount astride of a sitting cow, and follow. The face of
the girl on the bull had once been compared by someone with her own.
She thought of this picture now, and saw her school fellows-a throng
of shocked and wondering girls. Suppose one of them had been in her
position! 'Should I have been turning my face away, like the rest? I
wouldn't no, I wouldn't,' she thought; 'I should have understood!'
But she knew there was a kind of false emphasis in her thought.
Instinctively she felt the painter right. One who acted differently from
others, was lost.

She told her father of the encounter, adding:

"I expect he'll come, Daddy."

Pierson answered dreamily: "Poor fellow, I shall be glad to see him if
he does."

"And you'll sit to him, won't you?"

"My dear--I?"

"He's lonely, you know, and people aren't nice to him. Isn't it hateful
that people should hurt others, because they're foreign or different?"

She saw his eyes open with mild surprise, and went on: "I know you think
people are charitable, Daddy, but they aren't, of course."

"That's not exactly charitable, Nollie."

"You know they're not. I think sin often just means doing things
differently. It's not real sin when it only hurts yourself; but that
doesn't prevent people condemning you, does it?"

"I don't know what you mean, Nollie."

Noel bit her lips, and murmured: "Are you sure we're really Christians,
Daddy?"