simplest of pencil sketches, yet executed with a spirit and skill which astonished him.  The first was of Franz himself, done in a dozen lines.  There was no attempt at a portrait, yet somehow Franz was there, in the very set of the head, the angle of the lifted brow, the pose of the body, most of all in the indication of the smiling mouth, the drooping eyelids.  The second picture was a funny sketch of a big-eyed girl devouring food from a tray.  Two lines made the pillows behind her, six outlined the tray, a dozen more demonstrated plainly the famishing appetite with which the girl was eating.  It was all there—­it was astonishing how it was all there.

“My word!” he said as he laid down the sheets—­and took them up again, “that’s artist work, whether she knows it or not.  She must know it, though, for she must have had training.  I wonder where and how.”

He called Miss Arden and showed her the sketches.

“Dear me, but they’re clever,” she said.  “They look like a child’s work—­and yet they aren’t.”

“I should say not,” he declared very positively.  “That sort of thing is no child’s work.  That’s what painters do when they’re recording an impression, and I’ve often looked in more wonder at such sketchy outlines than at the finished product.  To know how to get that impression on paper so that it’s unmistakable—­I tell you that’s training and nothing else.  I don’t know enough about it to say it’s genius, too, yet I’ve had an artist friend tell me it cost him more to learn to take the right sort of notes than to enlarge upon those notes afterward.”

When he wrote to Anne next morning—­he was not venturing to ask more of her than one exchange a day—­he told her what he thought about those sketches: 

I’ve had that sheet pinned up at the foot of my bed ever since it came, and I’m not yet tired of looking at it.  You should have seen Franz’s face when I showed it to him.  “Ze arteeste!” he exclaimed, and laughed, and made eloquent gestures, by means of which I judged he was trying to express you.  He looked as if he were trying to impress me with his own hair, his eyes, his cheeks, his hands; but I knew well enough he meant you.  I gathered that he had been not ill pleased with his visit to you, for he proposes another; in fact, I think he would enjoy playing for you every day if you should care to hear him so often.  He does not much like to perform in the wards, though he does it whenever I suggest it.  He has discovered that though they listen respectfully while he plays his own beloved music, mostly they are happier when he gives them a bit of American ragtime, or a popular song hit.  His distaste for that sort of thing is very funny.  One would think he had desecrated his beloved violin when he condescends to it, for afterward he invariably gives it a special polishing with the old silk handkerchief he keeps in the case—­and Miss Arden vows he washes his hands, too.  Poor Franz!