o much like learning, with
Peter; it was as if he were being reminded of something he already
knew. He had never had a lesson in his whole life, he didn't go
about things in the right manner, and there were grave faults to be
overcome; but he had the thing itself.

She taught him more than the rudiments of technique, more than the
mere processes of mixing colors, more than shading and form, and
perspective, and flat surfaces, and high lights, and foreshortening.
She was the first person from the outside world with whom Peter had
ever come into real contact, the first person not a Southerner with
whom he had ever been intimately friendly. And oddly enough, Peter
taught _her_ a few things.

Riverton learned that Peter Champneys had been engaged as a sort of
fetch-and-carry boy by that big Vermont girl who was stopping at
Lynwood. They thought Miss Spring charming, when they occasionally
met her, but when it came to trapesing about the woods like a gipsy,
quite as irresponsible as Peter Champneys himself--"Birds of a
feather flock together," you know.

Claribel Spring was just at that time passing through a Gethsemane
of her own, and she needed Peter quite as badly as he needed her.
Peter was really a godsend to the girl. Her quiet self-control kept
any one from discovering that she was cruelly unhappy, but Peter did
at times perceive the shadow upon her face, and he knew that the
silence that sometimes fell upon her was not always a happy one. At
such times he managed to convey to her delicately, without words,
his sympathy. He piloted her to lovely places, he made her pause to
look at birds' nests, at corners of old fences, at Carolina
wild-flowers. And when he had made her smile again, he was happy. To
Peter that was the swiftest, happiest, most enchanted summer he had
ever known.

It ended all too soon. He went up to Lynwood one morning to find
Claribel packing for a hasty departure. It was a new Claribel that
morning, a Claribel with a rosy face and shining eyes and smiling
lips. She had gotten news, she told Peter joyously, that called her
away at once--beautiful news. The most wonderful news in the world!

She turned over to Peter all the material she had on hand, and gave
him painstaking directions as to how he was to proceed, what he was
to strive for, what to avoid. And she said that when he had become
a great man in the big world, one of these days, he wasn't to forget
that she'd prophesied it, and had be