ia.

"We mustn't waste the precious daylight if you really want to see my
pictures," she said after a while. "Come to the window and sit here on
these chairs, and I'll put the sketches on the easel. They are a series
I'm doing for a children's magazine in America. They're to be reproduced
in colour."

Miss Lindsay's sketches were charming, and full of a quaint fancy. They
were rendered in a medium of her own invention, a combination of pencil,
paint, and crayon, which gave the soft effect of a pastel with the
permanence of a water-colour. The first depicted a nurse holding by the
hand a tiny child, who turned with wondering eyes to look at delicate
little fairies which the grown-up person evidently did not see. In
another a little boy sat in the forest playing with butterfly-winged
elves who danced among the bright scarlet toadstools. A third showed a
brownie in a tree-top, nestling by the side of a baby owl, and a fourth
the pixies sporting under a starlit sky. There were many others, dainty,
imaginative and ethereal, some illustrating poems or books, and some
telling their own story, all painted with the same clever touch and
light, brilliant colouring.

"These are my favourites, so I've shown them first, while the light
lasts," said Miss Lindsay, "but I've heaps of other studies, landscapes
mostly, sketches of Scotland I took this summer. I'll go on putting them
on the easel, and when you're really bored stiff you must cry mercy, and
I'll stop."

"Bored!" said Lorraine, with a sigh of intense satisfaction, "they're
too lovely for anything! I'd give the world if I could paint like that!"

So they looked through piles of fascinating sketches till the short
daylight had faded, and the logs on the fire began to throw queer
shadows round the studio.

"We must go!" said Claudia at last. "I've some shopping to do for Violet
on my way back, and she'll be raggy if I don't turn up soon. I rather
believe the things are wanted for supper," she added casually.

"Then you must hurry," smiled Miss Lindsay, who was well acquainted with
the Bohemian ways of the Castleton family. "Even artists don't like to
be kept waiting for their meals, however absorbed they get in their
pictures." Then, turning to Lorraine, "I'm going to ask you to do
something for me, Kilmeny. Will you come to the common with me one day
this week at sunset, in the same brown dress you wore last Saturday, and
let me sketch you among the thistles and bracke