himself be sufficiently carried away by enthusiasm to remark, "I say,
Madge, you're no fool at that sort of thing, if you _are_ a girl!"

CHAPTER III

NOAH'S DOVE

"I really think, Miss Burtwell, you might be a little more careful,"
Miss Isabella Ricker wailed, in a tone of hopeless remonstrance. It
was the third time that morning that Madge had knocked against her
easel, and human nature could bear no more.

"I think so too," said Madge, in a voice as dejected as her victim's
own. "If I only knew how to prowl more intelligently, I would, I truly
would."

"Tie yourself to your own easel," suggested Delia Smith; "then that
will have to go first."

"You're a good one to talk!" cried Mary Downing. "You've upset my
things twice this very morning!"

"Put those two behind each other," Josephine Wilkes suggested. "It
will be a lesson to them."

"And who's going to sit behind the rear one?" somebody asked.

"Harriet Wells," Delia Smith proposed. "Mr. Salome said 'very good' to
her this morning; she must be proof against adversity."

"No one is proof against adversity," Madge declared, in a tragic tone;
but her remark passed unheeded. The girls were already at work again,
and nothing short of another wreck was likely to distract their
attention. The scrape of a palette-knife, the tread of a prowler, or
the shoving of a chair to one side, were the only sounds audible in
the room, excepting when the occasional roar of an electric car or the
rattle of a passing waggon came in at the open window. It was the
first warm day in April.

Artful Madge's sententious observation with regard to adversity was
the fruit of bitter experience. Misfortune's arrows had been raining
thick and fast about her, and although she was holding her ground
against them very well, she felt that adversity was a subject on which
she was fitted to speak with authority.

In the first place, her Student series was proving to be quite as much
of a Noah's Dove as the first set of sketches which had so signally
failed to find a permanent roosting-place in an inhospitable world.
Only yesterday the familiar parcel had made its appearance on the
front-entry table, that table which, for a year past, she had never
come in sight of without a quicker beating of the heart. If she ever
did have a bit of success, she often reflected, that piece of
ancestral mahogany was likely to be the first to know of it. How often
she had dreamed of the small busin