stoop of shoulder, a deepening of
pre-occupation and a few additional lines about mouth and forehead.

Hardly had the clerk gone with his letters than a light footstep
sounded on the narrow porch; the quick tap of a parasol was heard on
the door-sill; a pleasant voice asking, "Any admission except on
business?" and Therese crossed the small room and seated herself
beside Hosmer's desk before giving him time to arise.

She laid her hand and arm,--bare to the elbow--across his work, and
said, looking at him reproachfully:--

"Is this the way you keep a promise?"

"A promise?" he questioned, smiling awkwardly and looking furtively at
the white arm, then very earnestly at the ink-stand beyond.

"Yes. Didn't you promise to do no work after five o'clock?"

"But this is merely pastime," he said, touching the paper, yet leaving
it undisturbed beneath the fair weight that was pressing it down. "My
work is finished: you must have met Henry with the letters."

"No, I suppose he went through the woods; we came on the hand-car. Oh,
dear! It's an ungrateful task, this one of reform," and she leaned
back, fanning leisurely, whilst he proceeded to throw the contents of
his desk into hopeless disorder by pretended efforts at arrangement.

"My husband used sometimes to say, and no doubt with reason," she
continued, "that in my eagerness for the rest of mankind to do right,
I was often in danger of losing sight of such necessity for myself."

"Oh, there could be no fear of that," said Hosmer with a short laugh.
There was no further pretext for continued occupation with his pens
and pencils and rulers, so he turned towards Therese, rested an arm on
the desk, pulled absently at his black moustache, and crossing his
knee, gazed with deep concern at the toe of his boot, and set of his
trouser about the ankle.

"You are not what my friend Homeyer would call an individualist," he
ventured, "since you don't grant a man the right to follow the
promptings of his character."

"No, I'm no individualist, if to be one is to permit men to fall into
hurtful habits without offering protest against it. I'm losing faith
in that friend Homeyer, who I strongly suspect is a mythical apology
for your own short-comings."

"Indeed he's no myth; but a friend who is fond of going into such
things and allows me the benefit of his deeper perceptions."

"You having no time, well understood. But if his influence has had the
merit of drawing your thought