with slate and pencil. Once in the open, he had felt, there would
quickly show forth those gifts which Teevan was certain he possessed.

But day by day these excursions with the old painter had brought him to
believe that he had lost his way. That trick of color was not to be
learned, it was clear, by rough-and-ready advances. Teevan, who was ever
watchful of him, who betrayed, indeed, a strange little jealousy of any
other influence than his own, scanned his first studies eagerly, and
turned an inscrutable face on his young friend. He did not praise
loosely; he did not condemn outright. And he talked not too specifically
of the canvases before him. He showed little consciousness of a change
in the demeanor of his disciple, though Ewing's eye rested on him with a
long, unaccountable regard. Perhaps the boy was turning a little sullen.
This amused him. Meanwhile, the youth stood aghast before the dreadful
thing he saw in his heart. Hatred of a benefactor! All the good in him
struggled against it; all his gratitude pleaded with him to be fair to
the friend he had revered so long. Teevan talked more of Corot or
Constable, Diaz or Millet than he talked of Ewing; and the young man
came at last to the amazing conclusion not only that he was on a wrong
road, but that Teevan knew it--that the little man must long have known
it. This put him again in that rage of impotence that had seized him in
those last days at the League. But he bore it longer now. He felt there
was something final about this.

There were long days in the open to think on it, weigh it, and wring the
meaning from it. Sydenham placidly criticised his work; but Sydenham
could not feel his tragedy of defeat. A man who, at seventy, suffered
his own despairs with the poignant ecstasy of youth, could not take a
boy's failings seriously. Ewing now saw, moreover--for he was beginning
to use another pair of eyes than Teevan's--that Sydenham himself was a
hopeless mannerist, a color-mad voluptuary, painting always
subjectively, refusing all but the merest hints from his subject.

His last day of confessed futility, his last hour of inner rebellion,
came early in June. He carried his sketch trap out that day, but did not
unpack it. He lay, instead, pondering, resolving, raging, while
Sydenham, a little distance off, delicately corrected the errors of
Nature in a vista of meadow. Ewing chewed the juicy ends of long-stemmed
grasses and made phrases of disparagement for t