little touch of defiant pride had come into his manner when he spoke next, and though he resumed the conversation almost immediately, he turned it on common acquaintances and topics of general interest.

Ruth soon left off listening, and turned to the portfolio for amusement.

It was filled, as full as it could hold, with sketches of every variety of shape, size and subject, and done in almost every kind of medium. They were mostly very literal studies from nature, and, as they had all been taken within a circle of a few miles round, Ruth recognised the views again and again. Those three stunted oak trees, standing in a flat field, with a broken gate in the foregroundshe had passed the place twenty times; but she had never seen so much in the reality as this translation of the scene into black and white lines told her. She put the sketch down reluctantly and took up another. It was the same everywhere, nothing met her

eyes but common well-known objects; little bits of light and shade; the old broken wall of the dock-yard at Kingsmills, with vacantfaced sailors leaning over it and looking up at the sky, glimpses of light from furnace-fires, on dark, coarse faces, all familiar and all literally rendered, and yet each with a comment on it. The most splendid new scenes would not have given Ruth so much pleasure as these did, which gave her a hint, answering to a longing in her heart, of the possibility of gaining a power of seeing old things with ever new vision.

She came to the end of the sketches at length, and drew out one or two more finished drawings. In these, the artist had not been content with drawing what he had seen; he had amused himself by translating into his own language pictures which greater artists had already painted in words. Ruth was pleased to recognise one or two scenes from books she knew. There was Bertha Von

Lichtenried, sitting in the window of the old castle, reading in a saintly book. Bertha wore Alice's face, of course, but with something -Ruth was obliged to confess it to herselfsomething of resolution and holy calm to which Alice's face was as yet a stranger. Next came a vivid realisation of a verse from the Ancient Mariner.

"Like one that on a lonesome road,

Doth walk in fear and dread,

And having once turned round, walks on,,
And turns no more his head:
Because he knows a frightful fiend,

Does close behind him tread."

The mingling of fancy and reality in this sketch was very striking. Ruth knew the road perfectly; it was the lane leading from Earle's court to the Kingsmills Road, she knew the very spot; the dark hedge, stunted tree, and raised causeway, the very stones were all faithfully copied; and, crushing them down with rapid steps, came the solitary figure, spectre-dogged.

The last picture she took up pleased her most of all, and here again she noticed the mixture of careful literalness with wild fancy. Two lines of a well-known nursery-rhyme were written at the top of the page:

"One to watch, one to pray,

Two to bear the soul away."

Below was a sketch of Eva Meyer, asleep on the studio floor; the bare floor, the child's tumbled dress, the robust vigour and health expressed in the child's figure and face were all as little ideal as possible; but, hovering over this every-day figure, leant two wonderful forms. One, with down-cast eyes, outstretched arms, and drooping wings, expressed all the yearning agony of sympathetic love. This was the watching angel, before whose prophetic eyes all the coming sorrows of the child's life lay revealed. The praying angel guarded the head of the figure; his face was triumphant and calm, the eyes seemed to

pierce to an infinite distance, the hands were clasped on the breast in an attitude of patient waiting; between them rested a crown of stars, from which a faint white light shone round the head of the child, forming the one ideal touch that connected the upper with the lower half of the picture. Ruth held this sketch long in her hand. The sympathetic face of the watcher touched her most; that she could understand, the lesson of the hopeful one lay beyond her-too far off yet for her to read. She had not done with it when the sound of her cousin Maxwell's voice behind her recalled her thoughts to the pre

sent.

"You have been very patient for a long time," he said, coming up to her and speaking in the approving tone in which he would have addressed a child.

Ruth, though only two years younger than her sister Caroline, was accustomed to being treated like a child, and, in general, she did