is all very well," he said, one day in the sculptress's studio;
"but sooner or later she's going to catch me at it."

"What then?" asked the Bonnie Lassie, not looking up from her work.

"She'll go away."

"Let her go. Your portrait will be finished meantime, won't it?"

"Oh, yes. That'll be finished."

This time the Bonnie Lassie did look up. Immediately she looked back
again.

"In any case she'll have to go away some day--won't she?"

"I suppose so," returned he in a gloomy growl.

"I warned you at the outset, 'Dangerous,'" she pointed out.

They let it drop there. As for the effect upon the girl of Julien
Tenny's brilliant and unsettling personality, I could judge only as I
saw them occasionally together, she lustrous and exotic as a budding
orchid, he in the non-descript motley of his studio garb, serenely
unconscious of any incongruity.

"Do you think," I asked the Bonnie Lassie, who was sharing my bench one
afternoon as Julien was taking the patroness of Art over to where her
car waited, "that she is doing him as much good as she thinks she is, or
ought to?"

"Malice ill becomes one of your age, Dominie," said the Bonnie Lassie
with dignity.

"I'm quite serious," I protested.

"And very unjust. Bobbie is an adorable little person, when you know
her."

"Does Julien know her well enough to have discovered a self-evident
fact?"

"Only," pursued my companion, ignoring the question, "she is bored and a
little spoiled."

"So she comes down here to escape being bored and to get more spoiled."

"Julien won't spoil her."

"He certainly doesn't appear to bore her."

"She's having the tables turned on her without knowing it. Julien is
doing her a lot of good. Already she's far less beneficent and bountiful
and all that sort of stuff."

"Lassie," said I, "what, if I may so express myself, is the big idea?"

"Slang is an execrable thing from a professed scholar," she reproved.
"However, the big idea is that Julien is really painting. And it's
_mine_, that big idea."

"Mightn't it be accompanied by a little idea to the effect that the
experience is likely to cost him pretty dear? What will be left when
Bobbie Holland goes?"

"Pooh! Don't be an oracular sphinx," was all that I got for my pains.

Nor did Miss Bobbie show any immediate symptoms of going. If the
painting seemed at times in danger of stagnation, the same could not be
said of the fellowship between painter and paintee. That nourished