nd confided in. "After
I learn to draw heads just as nicely as possible, I am going to sketch
yours and Ernestine's for mama."

"Are you really?" exclaimed Jean in delight, "and like that one?"

"Yes, like this," said Olive, looking at her sketch, which was a copy of
a magnificent head of Demosthenes, cast in bas-relief against black
velvet. "Don't you think she will like it?"

"Oh, she'll just be too happy!" cried Jean, slipping from her lounge,
and limping over to Olive with her cane. "I want to talk a little while
now, will you, Olive?"

The young artist cast a hasty regretful look at her drawing, and was on
the point of putting off the little talk, for her fingers fairly
trembled to go on with her work, and catch with her pencil the peculiar
life-like expression about the mouth of the great orator; but the
temptation was thrust aside, and the next moment, Jean was sitting in
her lap, with the contented air of one who expects no rebuffs or
unreturned caresses.

"I've been watching you so long," she began, touching with loving
fingers, the long, heavy braid of beautiful hair, that had fallen over
Olive's shoulder, "and I just wanted to tell you how different you look
from the way you used to, you know."

"Yes," answered Olive, who had grown used to these loving bursts of
admiration from the observing little girl.

"I used to think," continued Jean, "that you was the most unhappy girl I
ever saw, and it made me feel so sorry, 'cause I thought it must be
somebody's fault, and then I wanted to kiss you, or something, but you
always looked so, I didn't know whether you'd like it or not, and so I
never did."

"But I would have been glad," said Olive, who could remember very well
the many times she had frozen the little girl's loving advances.

"I'll tell you why I was so unhappy, Jeanie; I thought no body loved me,
and that I was in the way."

"Why, Olive! Olive!" cried Jean in greatest amaze. "How could you think
so; who made you?"

"I made myself," said Olive. "I was so cross, that I made you all stay
away from me, and then I thought it was because no one cared for me,
because I was so ugly."

"You wasn't pretty then," was Jean's honest remark. "But you are now,
really, and so splendid looking some way. You haven't got rosy cheeks
like Miss Foster, nor yellow hair like Ernestine, but somehow I love to
look at you, and so does Cousin Roger, 'cause sometimes when you are
drawing, he just looks right straigh