“It’s very strange but it seems to me to be a little—a little like—you,” she continued, and then she raised her eyes to scan his face looking from him to the sketch and back again with her head on one side and a gleam of mischievous amusement in her glance. Evidently she intended braving it out; though it was easily seen that she was feeling both awkward and uncomfortable.

“Not a little,” he corrected, “but very much like me.”

“Ah! so you perceive it also? Yes, it is very much like you. Strange! I wonder how it got there?”

“So do I,” he answered dryly. “It is also a case for speculation how your handwriting got on the bottom of the paper.”

“Why, so it is, ‘Saint John the Beloved,’ whose beloved, I wonder, that’s a case for speculation also.”

She tossed the sketch on to the table and stood facing him with such an assured, audacious air that he could find nothing to say, so fell to scowling again in lieu of any verbal expression of his opinion concerning her. She had perfect control of herself now, and meant to give him no further satisfaction, indeed she was vexed to know that he had managed to confuse her at all; but it had been such an altogether unexpected contretemps and had taken her so entirely aback. She smiled at the angry young man, and began slowly pulling off her gloves.

“If you wish to copy that, Mr St. John,” she began, “you are welcome to make the attempt, but it is rather advanced. I should advise you to give your attention to something simpler.”

As she finished speaking she turned to a portfolio against the wall and abstracted thence a series of heads in outline, showing the method of working. These she placed on the table before him and ran through a brief explanation of the method, and how he should follow it, while he watched her in gloomy silence, and reluctantly admired the easy mastery with which she sketched in the first head for him to see.

“There,” she exclaimed, “now you know how to go on so I will leave you for a moment while I go and take off my outdoor things.”

She disappeared behind the old green curtain partitioning off a part of the room that had served her father for a sleeping apartment, and was now kept as a dressing-room but seldom used, and from thence into the tiny chamber which she called her bedroom. When she returned, in the big studio apron that he had first seen her in, she found 

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