Claribel Spring considered him.  He might be about fourteen.  His head just reached her shoulder.  And he was offering to take care of her, to be her protector!  That’s what his anxiety meant.  “Oh, you darling little gentleman!” she thought.

“I see.  And I’ll be perfectly delighted if you can manage to come with me, Peter,” said she, sincerely.  “And listen:  I’ve been thinking about those sketches of yours, while we were walking home, and I’ve got the nicest little plan all worked out in my mind.  You shall take me around these woods, which you know and I don’t.  You’ll be my guide, philosopher, and friend.  In return I’ll teach you what I can.  You needn’t bother about materials:  I have loads of stuff for the two of us.  What do you say?”

It was so unexpected, so marvelous, that an electrified and transformed Peter looked at her with a face gone white from excess of astonished rapture, and a pair of eyes like pools in paradise when the stars of heaven tremble in their depths.

Claribel Spring was a better teacher than artist, as she discovered for herself.  She had the divine faculty of imparting knowledge and at the same time arousing enthusiasm; and she had such a pupil now as real teachers dream of.  It wasn’t so much like learning, with Peter; it was as if he were being reminded of something he already knew.  He had never had a lesson in his whole life, he didn’t go about things in the right manner, and there were grave faults to be overcome; but he had the thing itself.

She taught him more than the rudiments of technique, more than the mere processes of mixing colors, more than shading and form, and perspective, and flat surfaces, and high lights, and foreshortening.  She was the first person from the outside world with whom Peter had ever come into real contact, the first person not a Southerner with whom he had ever been intimately friendly.  And oddly enough, Peter taught her a few things.

Riverton learned that Peter Champneys had been engaged as a sort of fetch-and-carry boy by that big Vermont girl who was stopping at Lynwood.  They thought Miss Spring charming, when they occasionally met her, but when it came to trapesing about the woods like a gipsy, quite as irresponsible as Peter Champneys himself—­“Birds of a feather flock together,” you know.

Claribel Spring was just at that time passing through a Gethsemane of her own, and she needed Peter quite as badly as he needed her.  Peter was really a godsend to the girl.  Her quiet self-control kept any one from discovering that she was cruelly unhappy, but Peter did at times perceive the shadow upon her face, and he knew that the silence that sometimes fell upon her was not always a happy one.  At such times he managed to convey to her delicately, without words, his sympathy.  He piloted her to lovely places, he made her pause to look at birds’ nests, at corners of old fences, at Carolina wild-flowers.  And when he had made her smile again, he was happy.  To Peter that was the swiftest, happiest, most enchanted summer he had ever known.