iled faintly.

"What I ought to have begun before," she said. "I am behindhand with my
work."

She laid the folio and her inkstand upon the table, and made certain
methodical arrangements for her labor. She worked diligently all day,
and looked slightly pale and wearied when she rose from her seat in
the evening. Until eleven o'clock she sat at the open door, sometimes
talking quietly, sometimes silent and listening to the wind among the
pines. She did, not mention her lover's name, and he did not come.
She spent many a day and night in the same manner after this. For the
present the long, idle rambles and unconventional moon-lit talks were
over. It was tacitly understood between herself and her aunt that
Lennox's labor occupied him.

"It seems a strange time to begin a picture--during a summer holiday,"
said Miss Thorne a little sharply upon one occasion.

Rebecca laughed with an air of cheer.

"No time is a strange time to an artist," she answered. "Art is a
mistress who gives no holidays."

She was continually her bright, erect, alert self. The woman who loved
her dearly and had known her from her earliest childhood, found her
sagacity and knowledge set at naught as it were. She had been accustomed
to see her niece admired far beyond the usual lot of women; she had
gradually learned to feel it only natural that she should inspire
quite a strong sentiment even in casual acquaintances. She had felt the
delicate power of her fascination herself, but never at her best and
brightest had she found her more charming or quicker of wit and fancy
than she was now.

Even Lennox, coming every few days with a worn-out look and touched with
a haggard shadow, made no outward change in her.

"She does not look," said the elder lady to herself, "like a neglected
woman." And then the sound of the phrase struck her with a sharp
incredulous pain. "A neglected woman!" she repeated,--"Beck!"

She did not understand, and was not weak enough to ask questions.

Lennox came and went, and Rebecca gained upon her work until she
could no longer say she was behindhand. The readers of her letters and
sketches found them fresh and sparkling, "as if," wrote a friend, "you
were braced both mentally and physically by the mountain air."

But once in the middle of the night Miss Thorne awakened with a
mysterious shock to find the place at her side empty, and her niece
sitting at the open window in a quiet which suggested that she might not