“Do you think,” he ventured again after a pause, and with a decided increase of diffidence, “that I am likely to be any good at it?”

Jill took up a pencil and penknife with the intent to sharpen the former but laid them down again suddenly and looked him squarely in the face.

“If you mean have you any talent for art?” she said coolly, “I am afraid I cannot give you much encouragement. You have a liking for it, and, I should say, possess a certain amount of perseverance; therefore in time you ought to turn out some fairly decent work, but you have not talent.”

He looked displeased, and fell to contemplating his work anew from the distinctly irritating standpoint of its not being quite such a success as he had deemed it.

“You are very candid,” he remarked, not altogether gratefully; “I suppose I should feel obliged to you. But, to be frank in my turn, you would do well not to be quite so candid with your pupils; you will never get on if you are.”

She laughed, and shrugged her shoulders with a careless, half-bitter gesture.

“Your advice is rather superfluous,” she answered; “I am not likely to get any pupils.”

“Why not?” he queried. “You have one.”

“Very true,” she replied, “I had not forgotten that; it is too gigantic a fact to be overlooked. Nevertheless, as I believe I remarked before, the coals and the stairs are likely to prove too great odds; facts—even gigantic ones—have a way of vanishing before great personal discomfort.”

He reached down his overcoat and thrust his arms into the sleeves without passing any comment on her last remark; there was such an extreme possibility, not in the stairs, or the coals, but in herself proving too much for him that he refrained from contradicting her. Jill watched him busily without appearing to do so until he was ready to go, and stood, hat in hand, apparently undecided whether to shake hands or no.

“Good morning,” she said, and bowed in so distant a manner, that, regretting his former indecision, he bowed back, and turning round went out with an equally brief salutation.

When he had gone Jill sat down in his seat and fell to studying his work.

“‘Shall I be any good at it?’” she mimicked, and then she laughed aloud. “‘Do you think that I am likely to 

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