hen, nearing the door, suddenly dropped Richard a quaint
little courtesy, and was gone.

This was the colorless beginning of a friendship that was destined
speedily to be full of tender lights and shadows, and to flow on with
unsuspected depth. For several days Richard saw nothing more of
Margaret, and scarcely thought of her. The strangle little figure was
fading out of his mind, when, one afternoon, it again appeared at his
door. This time Margaret had left something of her sedateness behind;
she struck Richard as being both less ripe and less immature than he
had fancied; she interested rather than amused him. Perhaps he had
been partially insulated by his own shyness on the first occasion,
and had caught only a confused and inaccurate impression of
Margaret's personality. She remained half an hour in the workshop,
and at her departure omitted the formal courtesy.

After this, Margaret seldom let a week slip without tapping once
or twice at the studio, at first with some pretext or other, and then
with no pretense whatever. When Margaret had disburdened herself of
excuses for dropping in to watch Richard mold his leaves and flowers,
she came oftener, and Richard insensibly drifted into the habit of
expecting her on certain days, and was disappointed when she failed
to appear. His industry had saved him, until now, from discovering
how solitary his life really was; for his life was as solitary--as
solitary as that of Margaret, who lived in the great house with only
her father, the two servants, and an episodical aunt. The mother was
long ago dead; Margaret could not recollect when that gray headstone,
with blotches of rusty-green moss breaking out over the lettering,
was not in the churchyard; and there never had been any brothers or
sisters.

To Margaret Richard's installation in the empty room, where as a
child she had always been afraid to go, was the single important
break she could remember in the monotony of her existence; and now a
vague yearning for companionship, the blind sense of the plant
reaching towards the sunshine, drew her there. The tacitly prescribed
half hour often lengthened to an hour. Sometimes Margaret brought a
book with her, or a piece of embroidery, and the two spoke scarcely
ten words, Richard giving her a smile now and then, and she returning
a sympathetic nod as the cast came out successfully.

Margaret at fifteen--she was fifteen now--was not a beauty. There
is the loveliness of the