gleam of sunset broke
through a cloud and fell across her hair. For a moment she seemed the
spirit of the shore personified--all its mystery, all its uncertainty,
all its elusive charm.

She has possibilities, thought Reeves.

Next day he began his picture. At first he had thought of painting her
as the incarnation of a sea spirit, but decided that her moods were
too fitful. So he began to sketch her as "Waiting"--a woman looking
out across the bay with a world of hopeless longing in her eyes. The
subject suited her well, and the picture grew apace.

When he was tired of work he made her walk around the shore with him,
or row up the head of the bay in her own boat. He tried to draw her
out, at first with indifferent success. She seemed to be frightened of
him. He talked to her of many things--the far outer world whose echoes
never reached her, foreign lands where he had travelled, famous men
and women whom he had met, music, art and books. When he spoke of
books he touched the right chord. One of those transfiguring flashes
he delighted to evoke now passed over her plain face.

"That is what I've always wanted," she said hungrily, "and I never get
them. Aunt hates to see me reading. She says it is a waste of time.
And I love it so. I read every scrap of paper I can get hold of, but I
hardly ever see a book."

The next day Reeves took his Tennyson to the shore and began to read
the _Idylls of the King_ to her.

"It is beautiful," was her sole verbal comment, but her rapt eyes said
everything.

After that he never went out with her without a book--now one of the
poets, now some prose classic. He was surprised by her quick
appreciation of and sympathy with the finest passages. Gradually, too,
she forgot her shyness and began to talk. She knew nothing of his
world, but her own world she knew and knew well. She was a mine of
traditional history about the bay. She knew the rocky coast by heart,
and every old legend that clung to it. They drifted into making
excursions along the shore and explored its wildest retreats. The girl
had an artist's eye for scenery and colour effect.

"You should have been an artist," Reeves told her one day when she had
pointed out to him the exquisite loveliness of a shaft of light
falling through a cleft in the rocks across a dark-green pool at their
base.

"I would rather be a writer," she said slowly, "if I could only write
something like those books you have read to me. What a glor