“Yes,” replied the girl shortly, “the thermometer is below Zero, I should say. Will you sit here please?”

She placed him as near the fire as possible and provided him with drawing-materials, then going over to a shelf began to rummage among endless books and papers for a suitable copy simple enough for him to start on.

“I wish to go in for the figure from life,” he modestly observed.

Jill fairly gasped at his audacity; she had understood him to say that he was a novice.

“How much,” she asked, pausing in her search and regarding him critically the while she put the question, “or how little drawing did I understand you to say you had done up to the present?”

“I haven’t done any,” he answered meekly.

Jill went on with her search again.

“We will commence with flat copies,” she crushingly remarked, “after that we will attempt the cast, and then—but there is ample time in which to think about such lofty aspirations.”

Mr St. John was not the mildest tempered of mortals but he sat mute under the rebuff and took the copy which she handed him without comment. It was an easy outline of a woman’s head, absurdly easy the new pupil considered it, and yet, to use his own vulgar phraseology after he had been working laboriously for ten minutes and had succeeded in rubbing a hole in the paper where the prominent feature should have been, it stumped him. Miss Erskine rose and stood over him with a disagreeable, I-told-you-so expression on her face.

“I can hardly accuse you of idleness,” she said, “you have been most energetic as the paper evinces. I think we had better start again on a fresh piece.”

She fetched another sheet of drawing paper and, taking the seat he had vacated, pinned it on the board, while he stood behind her, his brows drawn together in the old scowl, and a gleam of angry resentment in his eyes.

“The paper,” Jill continued in measured cutting tones, “was not wasted; it has served its purpose; for you have learnt your first lesson in art. It is a useful lesson, too, as it applies to other things that are worth mastering. The will to accomplish a thing is not the accomplishment, remember; it is necessary to the accomplishment, of course, but one must work hard, fight against difficulty, and defeat defeat. Now that you have acknowledged 

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