ook, looks universal Nature straight in
the face, and longs to begin!"

Miss Fairlie laughed with a ready good-humour, which broke out as
brightly as if it had been part of the sunshine above us, over her
lovely face.

"I must not take credit to myself where no credit is due," she said,
her clear, truthful blue eyes looking alternately at Miss Halcombe and
at me. "Fond as I am of drawing, I am so conscious of my own ignorance
that I am more afraid than anxious to begin. Now I know you are here,
Mr. Hartright, I find myself looking over my sketches, as I used to
look over my lessons when I was a little girl, and when I was sadly
afraid that I should turn out not fit to be heard."

She made the confession very prettily and simply, and, with quaint,
childish earnestness, drew the sketch-book away close to her own side
of the table. Miss Halcombe cut the knot of the little embarrassment
forthwith, in her resolute, downright way.

"Good, bad, or indifferent," she said, "the pupil's sketches must pass
through the fiery ordeal of the master's judgment--and there's an end
of it. Suppose we take them with us in the carriage, Laura, and let
Mr. Hartright see them, for the first time, under circumstances of
perpetual jolting and interruption? If we can only confuse him all
through the drive, between Nature as it is, when he looks up at the
view, and Nature as it is not when he looks down again at our
sketch-books, we shall drive him into the last desperate refuge of
paying us compliments, and shall slip through his professional fingers
with our pet feathers of vanity all unruffled."

"I hope Mr. Hartright will pay ME no compliments," said Miss Fairlie,
as we all left the summer-house.

"May I venture to inquire why you express that hope?" I asked.

"Because I shall believe all that you say to me," she answered simply.

In those few words she unconsciously gave me the key to her whole
character: to that generous trust in others which, in her nature, grew
innocently out of the sense of her own truth. I only knew it
intuitively then. I know it by experience now.

We merely waited to rouse good Mrs. Vesey from the place which she
still occupied at the deserted luncheon-table, before we entered the
open carriage for our promised drive. The old lady and Miss Halcombe
occupied the back seat, and Miss Fairlie and I sat together in front,
with the sketch-book open between us, fairly exhibited at last to my
professional eye