n any disposition
appealed so powerfully to the author. But as Orth stared to-day at the
brilliant youth, of whose life he knew nothing, he suddenly became aware
of a human stirring at the foundations of his aesthetic pleasure.

"I wish he were alive and here," he thought, with a sigh. "What a jolly
little companion he would be! And this fine old mansion would make a far
more complementary setting for him than for me."

He turned away abruptly, only to find himself face to face with the
portrait of a little girl who was quite unlike the boy, yet so perfect
in her own way, and so unmistakably painted by the same hand, that he
had long since concluded they had been brother and sister. She was
angelically fair, and, young as she was--she could not have been more
than six years old--her dark-blue eyes had a beauty of mind which must
have been remarkable twenty years later. Her pouting mouth was like a
little scarlet serpent, her skin almost transparent, her pale hair fell
waving--not curled with the orthodoxy of childhood--about her tender
bare shoulders. She wore a long white frock, and clasped tightly against
her breast a doll far more gorgeously arrayed than herself. Behind her
were the ruins and the woods of Chillingsworth.

Orth had studied this portrait many times, for the sake of an art which
he understood almost as well as his own; but to-day he saw only the
lovely child. He forgot even the boy in the intensity of this new and
personal absorption.

"Did she live to grow up, I wonder?" he thought. "She should have made a
remarkable, even a famous woman, with those eyes and that brow,
but--could the spirit within that ethereal frame stand the
enlightenments of maturity? Would not that mind--purged, perhaps, in a
long probation from the dross of other existences--flee in disgust from
the commonplace problems of a woman's life? Such perfect beings should
die while they are still perfect. Still, it is possible that this little
girl, whoever she was, was idealized by the artist, who painted into her
his own dream of exquisite childhood."

Again he turned away impatiently. "I believe I am rather fond of
children," he admitted. "I catch myself watching them on the street when
they are pretty enough. Well, who does not like them?" he added, with
some defiance.

He went back to his work; he was chiselling a story which was to be the
foremost excuse of a magazine as yet unborn. At the end of half an hour
he threw down h