“I’ve never seen anybody paint before, though I’ve always wanted to,” said Peter, and fetched an unconscious sigh of envy.

“You haven’t said whether or not you like it,” the girl reminded him.

“It isn’t finished,” said Peter.  His eyes went to the familiar woods, the beloved woods, and came back to her canvas.  “I think when it’s finished it will be like a photograph,” he added.

Claribel Spring—­for that was the big girl’s name—­knew her own limitations; but to meet a criticism so exact and so just, from a barefooted child in the South Carolina wilds wasn’t to be expected.  She took a longer look at the boy and thought she had never before seen a pair of eyes so absolutely, clearly golden.  Those eyes would create a distinct impression upon people:  either you’d like them, or you’d find them so strange you’d think them ugly.  She herself thought them beautiful.

“You seem to know something about pictures, even unfinished ones,” she told him comradely.  “And may I ask who you are, and why and how you come flying out of the nowhere into the here of these forsaken woods?”

“Oh, I’m only Peter Champneys,” said the boy with the golden eyes, shyly.  “I hope I didn’t startle you?  It’s my butterfly’s fault.  You see, I never know where I’ve got to follow him, or what I’m going to find when I get there.”

“Your butterfly?  You mean that Red Admiral that just whizzed by?  He skimmed over my easel,” said the young lady.

“Is that his real name?” Peter was enchanted.  “A black fellow with red on his coat-tails, and a sash like a general’s?  Then that’s my butterfly!” said Peter, happily.  He smiled at the girl again, and finished, naively:  “I owe that butterfly a whole heap of good luck!”

She told him she was spending some time with the Northern people who had lately bought Lynwood Plantation, a few miles down the river.  She liked to prowl around and paint things.

“And now,” she asked, “would you mind telling me something more about that butterfly of yours?  And where some more of the good luck comes in?” She was growing more and more interested in Peter.

Peter dropped down beside the easel, his hands clasped loosely between his knobby knees.  It seemed the most natural thing in the world that he should find himself talking freely to this Yankee girl; it was the most natural thing in the world that she should understand.  So Peter, who, as a rule, would have preferred to be beaten with rods rather than divulge his feelings, told her exactly what she wished to know.  This must be blamed upon the Red Admiral!

She caught a sharp outline of the child’s life, poor in material circumstances, but crowded to the brim with thought and feeling and emotion, and colorful as the coast country was colorful.  He had kept himself, she thought, as sweet and limpid as a mountain spring.  He was wistful, eager, and mad to know things.  His eyes went back again and again, with a sort of desperate hunger in them, to the canvas on her easel, as if the secret of him lay there.  The girl sat with her firm white chin in her firm white hands, and looked down at Peter with her bright blue Yankee eyes, and understood him as none of his own people had ever understood him.  She even understood what his innate reticence and decency held back.  Who shall say that the Admiral wasn’t a fairy?