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“Painting,” said Miss Marston, decisively. “You must stick to that.”

“How did you arrive at that conclusion–have you observed my work?”

“No! I’ll let you know some time, but now you must go to work. Come!” She rose, as if to go down to the lodge that instant. Clayton, without feeling the absurdity of the comedy, rose docilely and followed her down the path for some distance. He seemed completely dominated by the sudden enthusiasm and will that chance had flung him.

“There’s no such blessed hurry,” he remarked at last, when the first excitement had evanesced. “The light will be too bad for work by the time we reach Bar Harbor. Let’s rest here in this dark nook, and talk it all over.”

Clayton was always abnormally eager to talk over anything. Much of his artistic energy had trickled away in elusive snatches of talk. “Come,” he exclaimed, enthusiastically, “I have it. I will begin a great work–a modern Magdalen or something of that sort. We can use you in just that posture, kneeling before a rock with outstretched hands, and head turned away. We will make everything of the hands and arms!”

Miss Marston blushed her slow, unaccustomed blush. At first sight it pleased her to think that she had become so much a part of this interesting young man’s plans, but in a moment she laughed calmly at the frank desire he expressed to leave out her face, and the characteristic indifference he had shown in suggesting negligently such a subject.

“All right. I am willing to be of any service. But you will have to make use of the early hours. I teach the children at nine.”

“Splendid!” he replied, as the vista of a new era of righteousness dawned upon him. “We shall have the fresh morning light, and the cool and the beauty of the day. And I shall have plenty of time to loaf, too.”

“No, you mustn’t loaf. You will find me a hard task-mistress!”

III

True to her word, Miss Marston rapped at the door of the studio promptly at six the next morning. She smiled fearfully, and finding no response, tried stones at the windows above. She kept saying to herself, to keep up her courage: “He won’t think about me, and I am too old to care, anyway.” Soon a head appeared, and Clayton called out, in a sleepy voice:

“I dreamt it was all a joke; but wait a bit, and we will talk it over.”

Miss Marston entered the untidy studio, where the debris of a month’s fruitless efforts strewed the floor. Bits of clay and carving-tools, canvases hurled face downward in disgust and covered with paint-rags, lay scattered about. She tip-toed around, carefully raising her skirt, and examined everything. Finally, discovering an alcohol-lamp and a coffee- pot, she prepared some coffee, and when Clayton appeared–a somewhat dishevelled god–he found her hunting for biscuit.

“You can’t make an artist of me at six in the morning,” he growled.

In sudden inspiration, Miss Marston threw open the upper half of the door and admitted a straight pathway of warm sun that led across the water just rippling at their feet. The hills behind the steep shore were dark with a mysterious green and fresh with a heavy dew, and from the nooks in the woods around them thrush was answering thrush. Miss Marston gave a sigh of content. The warm, strong sunlight strengthened her and filled her wan cheeks, as the sudden interest in the artist’s life seemed to have awakened once more the vigor of her feelings. She clasped her thin hands and accepted both blessings. Clayton also revived. At first he leant listlessly against the door-post, but as minute by minute he drank in the air and the beauty and the hope, his weary frame dilated with incoming sensations. “God, what beauty!” he murmured, and he accepted unquestioningly the interference in his life brought by this woman just as he accepted the gift of sunshine and desire.