shook a regretful head.

"I'm fearfully sorry, Lesbia," she apologized. "I'd have let you have my
box with pleasure, only you see Dad gave it to me as a Christmas
present, and I don't think he'd like me to swop it. He wants me to take
some lessons in flower-painting. And I have a camera already. I don't
mean my own--that was broken six months ago--but Uncle Fred has lent me
his, and it's a perfect beauty. I've got his developing-machine too."

"Nothing doing then, I suppose," said Lesbia, turning ruefully away, and
wishing she had never asked the favour.

The Patterson household was well stocked with books, but had no art
effects. A glue brush and a pot of white enamel were the utmost they
could muster in the matter of painting paraphernalia. Even a Raphael's
genius would have been hampered by such elementary stock-in-trade.
Lesbia came to the sorrowful conclusion that life for the present must
be lived without an oil paint-box. But the lack of this means of
"self-expression" did not curtail the strong artistic instincts that
were stirring in her. She found herself always looking for the pictorial
aspect of things, and thinking how she could transfer them to canvas.
When she was teaching the juniors she would watch Maisie Martin's head
bent over her dictation book, and think how beautifully the outline of
that pink cheek and the ruddy hair might be rendered against a
silver-grey background. She would sometimes surreptitiously sketch the
children's attitudes in her notebook, rejoicing over the graceful turn
of an arm, or the subtle curve of a white neck, while its owner,
conscious of her gaze, wondered what black score was being entered on
the time-sheet. Even in the midst of scolding her tiresome flock the
artistic side would crop out, and she would register mental impressions
of the dancing light in naughty Esmee's dark eyes, the beautiful shape
of Sylvia's little hand that was holding the pen all wrong, and the
silky sheen on Gwennie's flaxen hair, as that irrepressible damsel
fidgeted at her desk. If her small pupils could only have been artist's
models, the hours spent with them would have been a pleasure instead of
a daily dread.

In her own form, too, Lesbia was allowing herself to drift into a dreamy
habit of art observation instead of mental concentration. She sketched
on the borders of her textbooks and on her blotting-paper, and was even
guilty of purloining bits of coloured chalk from the blackboard box,