homas had been apprised of her coming and greeted her amiably.
It is only fair to say that she gave the studio the cleaning it
generally received without observing that anything whatever had
happened to it.

Hilary Vance, who was of that rare, but happy, disposition, came to
breakfast in splendid spirits. He also did not observe that anything
had happened to the studio. But when he got to his work he kept
looking up from it with a puzzled air.

At last he said:

"It's odd--very odd. Lately I've been thinking that my sight was
beginning to weaken. But this morning I can see quite clearly. Yet it
isn't a very bright morning."

"Perhaps if you had the skylight cleaned on the outside, too, you'd see
clearer still," said Pollyooly in the tone of one throwing out a
careless suggestion.

Hilary Vance looked round the studio more earnestly:

"By Jove! You've cleaned it again!" he cried. "You are a brick,
Pollyooly. But all the same you're my guest here; and it's not the
function of a guest to clean her host's house. I ought to have
remembered it and had it cleaned before you came."

"But I liked doing it. I did, really," said Pollyooly.

"You are undoubtedly a brick--a splendid brick," he said
enthusiastically.

Hilary Vance was one of those great-hearted men of thirty who crave for
sympathy; he must unbosom himself. Pollyooly was not quite the
confidante of his ideal; but his mentor, James, the novelist (not
Henry), was in Scotland; and the salt sea flowed between him and the
Honourable John Ruffin. Pollyooly was at hand, and she was
intelligent. No later than the next morning he began to talk to her of
Flossie--her beauty, her charm, her sympathetic nature, her
womanliness, and her intelligence.

Pollyooly received his confidences with the utmost politeness. She
could not, indeed, follow him in his higher, finer flights; but she
succeeded in keeping on her angel face an expression of sufficient
appreciation to satisfy his unexacting mind. It is to be feared that
she did not really appreciate the splendour of the passion he displayed
before her; it is even to be feared that she regarded it as no more
than a further eccentricity in an eccentric nature. She grew curious,
however, to see the lady who had so enthralled him, and was, therefore,
pleased when she suggested that she should relieve Mrs. Thomas of the
housekeeping, that he accepted the suggestion and told her to procure,
among other things,