at the sight of these flowers, and noted keenly every exquisite outline and delicate hue of the group.  It seemed to her at the moment that she had never seen anything so beautiful before.  Mechanically she took up her pencil and began to imitate on a piece of paper the waving line of the bramble wreath, and the graceful curves of the leaves.  To her own great surprise something very like the bramble soon began to appear upon the paper.  A sharp touch here, a little shadow there, and her drawing looked vigorous and true.  After working in great excitement for some time Hetty got up and pinned her drawing to the wall, and stood some way off looking at it.  Where had it come from? she asked herself.  She had never learned to draw.  She had not known that she could draw.  Oh, how delightful it would be if she could reproduce the flowers as they grew!  Not quite able to believe in the new power she had discovered in herself, she set again to work, altering the arrangement of the flowers in the jar, and taking a larger sheet of paper.  It was only ruled exercise paper, but that did not seem to matter when the flowers blossomed all over it.  The second drawing was even better than the first; and Hetty stood looking at it with flushed cheeks and throbbing heart, wondering what was this new rapture that had suddenly sprung up in her life.

As her work was done, and the afternoon was all her own, she was able to give herself up to this unexpected delight, and spent many hours composing new groups of flowers, and arranging them in fanciful designs.  When a maid brought up her solitary tea she lifted her flushed face and murmured, “Oh, can it be tea-time?” and then spread out all her drawings against the wall, and stared at them while she ate her bread and butter.

She felt nervous at the thought of letting anybody see them, and locked them up in her desk before Miss Davis and the other girls came home.

In earliest dawn of the next morning, however, she was out of bed and studying the drawings as she stood in her night-dress and with bare feet.  Were they really good, she asked herself, or were her eyes bewitched; and would Mr. Enderby laugh at them if he saw them?  Anguish seized on her at the thought, and she dressed herself with trembling hands.  A new idea, striving in her mind, seemed to set all nature thrilling with a meaning it had never borne for her before.  There had been great painters on the earth, as she knew full well, whose existence had been made beautiful and glorious by their genius; and there were artists living in the present day, small and great, who must surely be the happiest beings in the world.  Their days were spent, not in drudgery, and lecturing, and primness, but in the study and reproduction of the beauty lying round them.  Oh, if God should have intended her to be one of these!