ere, and I was merely throwing light on it."

The battle was worth watching. The two young women were as dissimilar as
beauty can be. Both had all the charms of well-nurtured and
well-cared-for flesh. Splendid necks and shoulders, plenty of their own
hair, lovely contour of face, practice in the use of the lot, were
theirs in common. But Vi was dark, still, and long of limb. Blanche was
blonde, vivacious, and compact without being in the least heavy.

Vi spoke slowly. Even for an English woman she had a low voice. It was a
voice of peculiar power. One always waited for it to finish. Vi knew its
power. She tormented her opponents by drawling. Blanche also spoke
softly, but at will she could make her words scratch like the sharp
claws of a kitten.

"And how did you ever get the model to take that startled pose?" Blanche
was asking Lewis.

"That's where the luck came in," said Lewis, smiling; "and the luck is
what keeps the work from being great."

"What do you mean?"

"Well," said Lewis, "Le Brux says that luck often leads to success,
never to greatness."

"And how did luck come in?" drawled Vi.

Lewis smiled again.

"I'll tell you," he said. "The model is an old pal of mine. One day we
were bathing in the Marne,--at least I was bathing, and she was just
going to,--when a farmer appeared on the scene and yelled at her. She
was startled and turning to make a run for it when I shouted, 'Hold that
pose, Cellette! She's a mighty well-trained model. For a second she held
the pose. That was enough. She remembered it ever after.

"Does it take a lot of training to be a model?" asked Blanche. "How
would I do?" She turned her bare shoulders frankly to him.

Lewis glanced at her. "Yours is not a beauty that can be held in stone,"
he said. "You are too respectable for a bacchante, too vivacious for
anything else." He turned to Vi. "You would do better," he said as
though she too had asked.

Vi said nothing, but her large, dark eyes suddenly looked away and
beyond the room. A flush rose slowly into her smooth, dusky cheek.
Blanche bit her under lip.

"Vi has won out," said H lne to Leighton.

CHAPTER XXVI

Natalie and her mother were sitting on the west veranda of Consolation
Cottage at the evening hour. Just within the open door of the
dining-room mammy swayed to and fro in a vast rocking-chair that looked
too big for her.

The years had not dealt kindly with the three. Years in the tropics
never do dea