h
the palette knife,--'but I find it almost impossible to teach you.
There's a queer grin, Dutch touch about your painting that I like; but
I've a notion that you're weak in drawing. You foreshorten as though you
never used the model, and you've caught Kami's pasty way of dealing with
flesh in shadow. Then, again, though you don't know it yourself, you
shirk hard work. Suppose you spend some of your time on line lone. Line
doesn't allow of shirking. Oils do, and three square inches of flashy,
tricky stuff in the corner of a pic sometimes carry a bad thing off,--as
I know. That's immoral. Do line-work for a little while, and then I can
tell more about your powers, as old Kami used to say.'

Maisie protested; she did not care for the pure line.

'I know,' said Dick. 'You want to do your fancy heads with a bunch of
flowers at the base of the neck to hide bad modelling.' The red-haired
girl laughed a little. 'You want to do landscapes with cattle knee-deep
in grass to hide bad drawing. You want to do a great deal more than
you can do. You have sense of colour, but you want form. Colour's a
gift,--put it aside and think no more about it,--but form you can be
drilled into.

Now, all your fancy heads--and some of them are very good--will keep you
exactly where you are. With line you must go forward or backward, and it
will show up all your weaknesses.'

'But other people----' began Maisie.

'You mustn't mind what other people do. If their souls were your soul,
it would be different. You stand and fall by your own work, remember,
and it's waste of time to think of any one else in this battle.'

Dick paused, and the longing that had been so resolutely put away came
back into his eyes. He looked at Maisie, and the look asked as plainly
as words, Was it not time to leave all this barren wilderness of canvas
and counsel and join hands with Life and Love?

Maisie assented to the new programme of schooling so adorably that Dick
could hardly restrain himself from picking her up then and there and
carrying her off to the nearest registrar's office. It was the implicit
obedience to the spoken word and the blank indifference to the unspoken
desire that baffled and buffeted his soul. He held authority in that
house,--authority limited, indeed, to one-half of one afternoon in
seven, but very real while it lasted. Maisie had learned to appeal
to him on many subjects, from the proper packing of pictures to the
condition of a smoky ch