ivery. Glorious
were their holidays in Paris and Vienna; wonderful nights in Venice!
Always together! To their sudden migration to Egypt, whence he returned
with a portfolio of exciting promise. Alas, the slender fulfilment! for
then was the time for work,--the sobering thought of Baby Phyllis.

But to Valentine and Robert Oglebay, Baby Phyllis soon meant a new
frolic. Nurse Farquharson's were the competent hands. Their life went on
unchanged.

At five, Baby Phyllis, in her white nightie, her blue eyes shining, and
her curls crowned with roses, danced among the wine-glasses at her
mother's birthday party, and enraptured the guests by singing, in
various keys, the song with which beautiful Valentine herself had
captivated London,--"If I could wear trousers, I know what I should do."
If you knew your way about town in the early eighties, you may remember
the song. The encore was uproarious: three times Baby Phyllis had to
lift her little leg and strike the match on her nightie. They drank her
health standing, as she disappeared, smiling at them over Nurse
Farquharson's shoulder.

Upstairs, having cuddled Phyllis in bed, Valentine caught the expression
on the nurse's face. She put her arms around Farquharson appealingly.

"Don't be cross with me on my birthday," she pleaded.

Farquharson patted the pretty upraised hands, glittering with diamonds.

"You mustn't look cross at my mamma, Farkson," cooed Baby Phyllis.

Careless, happy days and sparkling nights! Robert and Valentine were
always together, their honeymoon endless; in Paris, in Buda-Pesth, in
Rome, in Constantinople, in Holland. You should have seen Valentine in
the Dutch costume she brought home. Each of the inseparable trio of
artists, Mr. Singleton, Mr. Leonard, and Mr. Knowles, painted her
portrait, and made love to her, and was laughed at and scolded. It is
little enough to say of her that she idolized Robert.

When they returned from their first trip to Norway, in 1897, Robert
Oglebay, now forty and growing stout, told his friends he had found what
he was looking for at last. The strong, deep sentiment of the North had
clutched at him and held him fast. And indeed those shimmering, moonlit
studies of the little fishing village, where they spent that summer and
autumn, are his best.

Early in the following summer they flitted northward again, with joyful
eagerness. They took nine-year-old Phyllis with them.

While her father painted, and her mother