he remained listening to Mrs. Leighton while his daughter bustled up to
the sketches pinned round the room and questioned Alma about them.

"Ah suppose you awe going to be a great awtust?" she said, in friendly
banter, when Alma owned to having done the things. "Ah've a great notion
to take a few lessons mahself. Who's yo' teachah?"

Alma said she was drawing in Mr. Wetmore's class, and Miss Woodburn said:
"Well, it's just beautiful, Miss Leighton; it's grand. Ah suppose it's
raght expensive, now? Mah goodness! we have to cyoant the coast so much
nowadays; it seems to me we do nothing but cyoant it. Ah'd like to hah
something once without askin' the price."

"Well, if you didn't ask it," said Alma, "I don't believe Mr. Wetmore
would ever know what the price of his lessons was. He has to think, when
you ask him."

"Why, he most be chomming," said Miss Woodburn. "Perhaps Ah maght get
the lessons for nothing from him. Well, Ah believe in my soul Ah'll
trah. Now ho' did you begin? and ho' do you expect to get anything oat
of it?" She turned on Alma eyes brimming with a shrewd mixture of fun
and earnest, and Alma made note of the fact that she had an early
nineteenth-century face, round, arch, a little coquettish, but extremely
sensible and unspoiled-looking, such as used to be painted a good deal in
miniature at that period; a tendency of her brown hair to twine and twist
at the temples helped the effect; a high comb would have completed it,
Alma felt, if she had her bonnet off. It was almost a Yankee country-
girl type; but perhaps it appeared so to Alma because it was, like that,
pure Anglo-Saxon. Alma herself, with her dull, dark skin, slender in
figure, slow in speech, with aristocratic forms in her long hands, and