“I’d be delighted, Miss Elsie.”

“He’d make it easier,—­he’d know what to say, and Royal would know what to say to him.  The others will excuse us; we won’t be long.  Oh, may I—­may we, papa?”

“Well, as you seem to have settled everything, I don’t see but I must—­”

But Elsie did not wait to hear more.  She knew she had not only her father’s consent, but his approval, and was off like a flash to order the carriage.

If the Lloyds had been better acquainted in Lime Ridge, Royal’s work would not have been such a great surprise to them.  A good many of the Lime Ridge people could have told them of the boy’s talent, and how it had been discouraged by his family.  There was no money now to support and educate him in that direction, and it had been arranged with an old friend who was in the wool business that the boy should go into his employ as soon as he had graduated from the Lime Ridge High School.  This was considered a very lucky prospect for him, but Royal hated it.  From a little fellow he had shown a great love for pictures, and had covered every scrap of paper he could find with crude drawings.

When he was eight years old, a visitor had given him a box of paints and brushes.  Two years later he had become acquainted with an artist who was staying a few weeks at Lime Ridge, and went with him on his sketching-tramps.  With him he learned something about an artist’s methods, and received from him as a parting gift, various artist’s materials that he had made industrious use of.

The whim of painting the eggs and sending them to the sisters had come to him as a sort of apology to them for his exhibition of temper, and he had no idea that his name, so palpable to his artist eye, would escape their observation as it did.  He expected his gift and its motives to be recognized at once.  Instead, he was questioned as if he were nothing but an ignorant errand-boy; and, bitterest of all, even when he had confessed to a knowledge of the giver, the possibility of his being the painter himself was not for a moment suspected.  But while he stood leaning over the farm-gate thinking these bitter thoughts, a stout little pony was bringing him what he little dreamed of.  “Catch me ever going amongst ’em again,—­an overbearing lot of city folks,” he was saying to himself, when, patter, patter, patter, round the turn of the road came the stout little pony, and before the boy could make a movement to get away, Elsie Lloyd had jumped from the wagon, and stood in front of him.

“I’ve come to ask you to go back with us, and forgive me for being such a horrid little cat to you.  I didn’t understand.  I thought—­” and then in a perfect jumble of words Elsie went on, and poured forth her contrition and explanation, at the same time introducing Jimmy Barrows, who knew just what to say, and said it with such effect that Royal’s spirits went up with a bound, and almost before he knew to what he had consented, he was sitting on the little back seat of the phaeton, talking with these “city folks” as if they were his best friends, as they turned out to be.