were the ruins and the woods of Chillingsworth.

Orth had studied this portrait many times, for the sake of an art which
he understood almost as well as his own; but to-day he saw only the
lovely child. He forgot even the boy in the intensity of this new and
personal absorption.

"Did she live to grow up, I wonder?" he thought. "She should have made a
remarkable, even a famous woman, with those eyes and that brow,
but--could the spirit within that ethereal frame stand the
enlightenments of maturity? Would not that mind--purged, perhaps, in a
long probation from the dross of other existences--flee in disgust from
the commonplace problems of a woman's life? Such perfect beings should
die while they are still perfect. Still, it is possible that this little
girl, whoever she was, was idealized by the artist, who painted into her
his own dream of exquisite childhood."

Again he turned away impatiently. "I believe I am rather fond of
children," he admitted. "I catch myself watching them on the street when
they are pretty enough. Well, who does not like them?" he added, with
some defiance.

He went back to his work; he was chiselling a story which was to be the
foremost excuse of a magazine as yet unborn. At the end of half an hour
he threw down his wondrous instrument--which looked not unlike an
ordinary pen--and making no attempt to disobey the desire that possessed
him, went back to the gallery. The dark splendid boy, the angelic little
girl were all he saw--even of the several children in that roll-call of
the past--and they seemed to look straight down his eyes into depths
where the fragmentary ghosts of unrecorded ancestors gave faint musical