furniture of a somewhat scanty description; that a good many vigorous studies were stuck about; and that the whole aspect of the place looked like business.

Then he surveyed Miss Lascelles, who was pacifying her dog.

She was not at all the sort of person he had expected to see, though it must be owned he had built his ideas without a vestige of foundation. She was small and very girlish-looking, with a bright, happy face and pretty, graceful movements. Her dress was of some soft brown material, with velvet of a darker shade about the neck which matched the brown hair lying smoothly on her little head.

“Sandy, be quiet!” she said; then looking at Everitt, “You are sent by Mr Everitt?”

“Signorina, yes.” He felt that on this score, at any rate, there could be no question.

“I have been expecting you for some time,” she went on; “I should like you to be more punctual another morning. But now I will show you where you are to stand.”

To stand! Everitt’s heart sank; he had hoped he might sit.

“I want,” said Miss Lascelles, calmly—“I want you to stand with your hand above your eyes, shading them—so. You are to be one of a group of peasants who are coming into Rome with all their goods, escaping from an inundation—you must have seen them, I’m sure? You are leading the string, and looking before you eagerly, perhaps to see whether some one who is missing is in front. You understand?”

“Signorina, yes. But—”

“What?”

“The sun with an inundation?”

“It has broken out, and is shining on the pools of water in the road.”

Everitt felt much more capable of criticising and suggesting than of posing as she desired, but there was no help for it. She had even looked a little astonished at receiving his last remark. He exerted himself now to stand in such a position that he could see her at work at her easel, and he was sufficiently experienced to be able to judge from her manner of handling her brush that she worked with vigour and freedom. He was conscious at the same time that he was not himself a good model; he even suspected that he now and then read a little disappointment in her face. Keeping his arm raised was fatiguing; he knew that he 

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