The two men crossed the street, in the mellow September sunshine.  Burns preceded Leaver and knocked at the door.

“Will you take a shot at my friend before he goes?” Burns asked Charlotte.  “He hates standing up to be shot at, but I have him primed for the ordeal.”

“Must it be a shot, or may I make a portrait?” asked the photographer, in her professional manner.

“I want a portrait,” replied Burns, promptly.  “Your best indoor work—­Brant and the Misses Kendall put on their mettle to rival it.”

While Charlotte was absent, making ready her plates, her visitors waited in the little living-room and looked about it.  Its walls were now possessed of many interesting photographs of people in the village, among them several of Burns himself, at which he gazed with a quizzical expression.

“She certainly succeeds in making a hero of me, doesn’t she?” he observed.  “Red hair turns dusky before the camera, luckily for me.  I look as if there wasn’t much of anything I couldn’t do, including playing leading man in a melodrama—­eh?”

“She has caught the personality, cleverly enough,” Leaver commented, looking over Burns’s shoulder.

“I rather think, though,” mused Burns, “that I don’t look so much as if there wasn’t anything I couldn’t do as that I thought there wasn’t.  There’s a difference, Jack,—­eh?  Do I really seem as ready to bounce out of my chair and tackle somebody as that picture makes me look?  If I do I need to have a tourniquet applied somewhere about my neck to stop the flow of blood to my bumptious head.”

Smiling, Leaver studied the photograph in question.  “It’s the best I ever saw of you.  It’s precisely that air of being all there and ready for action which is your most endearing characteristic.  It is the quality which made me willing to put myself in your hands last April.”

“Much obliged.  But you didn’t put yourself in my hands.  I laid hands on you and tied you down.  I couldn’t do it now, though,” and Burns turned to survey his friend with satisfaction.  “You are in elegant trim, if I do say it who shouldn’t, and that’s why I want a picture of my handiwork—­and Nature’s.  It’s just possible that Nature deserves some credit, not to mention Amy Mathewson.  By the way, she’s another who must have this portrait of you, my boy.”

“She certainly shall, if she cares for it,” admitted Leaver, gravely.  “I’m very willing to remind her how much I owe her, in that and better ways.”

Charlotte appeared.  As she set about her work Bob came racing over the lawn and in at the open door.

“Uncle Red, somebody wants you right away quick!” he announced.

“Just my luck!  I wanted to help pose the picture,” grumbled Burns, but went off, the boy on his shoulder shouting with delight.

The photographer, in the plain dress of dull blue, which, artist-wise, she had chosen as her professional garb, and in which she herself made a picture to be observed with enjoyment, moved deftly about the room arranging her lights and shadows.  This done, she turned to her sitter.  When she came in he had been standing before a set of prints upon the wall, studying them critically, but from the moment of her entrance he had been watching her, though he held a photograph in his hand with which he might have seemed to be engaged.