basketfuls. I'll offer her three, and she'll drop like a shot."

"I'll make it a red picture," he continued, dipping his brushes into a
little case of paints he held on his thumb; "the mussel-bed a reddish
violet, the sky red in the horizon, and the girl in the foreground,
with that torrent of hair as the high light. I've been hunting for that
hair all over Europe." And he began sketching her in at once.

"_Bonjour, mere_, how goes it?" He nodded as he sketched at a wrinkled,
bent figure, who was smiling out at him from beneath her load of
mussels.

"_Pas mal--e' vous, M'sieur Renard?_"

"All right--and the mortgage, how goes that?"

"Pas si mal--it'll be paid off next year."

"Who is she? One of your models?"

"Yes, last year's: she was my belle--the belle of the mussel-bed for
me, a year ago. Now there's a lesson in patience for you. She's sixty-
five, if she's a minute; she's been working here, on this mussel-bed,
for five years, to pay the mortgage off her farm; when that is done,
her daughter Augustine can marry; Augustine's _dot_ is the farm."

"Augustine--at our inn?"

"The very same."