smile, again and again he gave himself to
the slope and the mercy of his insurgent legs, and at length, bearing
heavily on his trail-pole, managed to reach the level below without
capsizing.

She praised him warmly, rescued his wool gloves and cap from snowy
furrows into which their owner had angrily but helplessly dived; and
then she stepped into her skis and ascended the hill beside him with
that long-limbed, graceful, swinging stride which he had ventured to
believe might become him also.

He said hopelessly: "If you expect me to hunt wild boar with you on
skis, there'll be some wild and widely distributed shooting in this
county. How can I hit a boar while describing unwilling ellipses in
mid-air or how can I run away from one while I'm sticking nose down in a
snow-drift?"

Too faint with laughter to reply, she stood leaning on her trailing-pole
and looking over his shoulder as he repitched his sketching easel,
squeezed the colours from the leaden tubes, and set his palette.

"I'm horribly hungry," he grumbled; "too hungry to make a decent sketch.
How cold is it, anyway? I believe that this paint is trying to freeze on
my palette!"

"What are you going to paint?" she asked, her rounded chin resting on
his shoulder.

"That frozen brook." He looked around at her, hesitating; and she
laughed and nodded her comprehension.

"You want to make a sketch of me, dear. Why don't you ask me? Do you
think I'd refuse?"

"It's so beastly cold to ask you to stand still----"

"Cold! Why, it's much warmer; it's ten above zero. I'll stand wherever
you wish. Where do you want me; here above you, against the snow and
sky?"

The transcendent loveliness of the picture she made set that excited
thrill quivering through every vein; but he took a matter-of-fact grip
on his emotions because good work is done in cold blood, even if it
sometimes may be conceived in exaltation.

"Don't move," he said serenely; "you are exactly right as you stand.
Tell me the very moment you feel cold. Promise?"

"Yes, dear."

His freezing colours bothered him, and at times he used them almost like
pastels. He worked rapidly, calmly, and with that impersonal precision
that made every brush stroke an integral factor in the ensemble.

At almost any stage of the study the accidental brilliancy of his
progress might have been terminated abruptly, leaving a sketch rarely
beautiful in its indicated and unfinished promise.

But the pitfalls of the a