myself to see lady Pilkey's landscape. When I returned I found her
still sitting in grave absorption before the studies that had taken
us so by surprise. Her face was full of a soft new light; I had
never before seen the spring touched in her that could flood it like
that.

'You were very nearly right,' I announced; 'but the blaze of colour
was in the middle distance, and there was a torrent in the
foreground that quite put it out. And the picture does take the
Society's silver medal.'

'I can not decide,' she replied without looking at me, 'between the
Kattiawar fair thing and those hills in the rain. I can only have
one--father won't hear of more than one.'

'You can have two,' I said bluntly, so deeply interested I was in
the effect the things had on her. 'And I will have a third for
myself. I can't withstand those apricot-trees.'

I thought there was moisture in the eyes she turned upon me, an
unusual thing--a most unusual thing--in Dora Harris; but she winked
it back, if it was there, too quickly for any certainty.

'You are a dear,' she said. Once or twice before she had called me
a dear. It reminded me, as nothing else ever did, that I was a
contemporary of her father's. It is a feeble confession, but I have
known myself refrain from doing occasional agreeable things
apprehending that she might call me a dear.