‘You are lawless.  And your subject is—­unmanageable!’

‘Do you think so?’

‘You want what is “around” this grey rock,’ she said with a light twirl on the tips of her toes.  ’If your views on most subjects are as comprehensive!’—­

‘They can be met, nevertheless,’ said he, laughing, ’if you take one part of the subject and I the other—­and if you’ll give me a pencil!  We must be done in a quarter of an hour.’

‘There it is,’ said Wych Hazel,—­’then you can take half of the rock’—­and she walked away to a position as far behind Mr. Rollo as sweetbriars and sumach would permit.  That gentleman turned about and faced her gravely; also withdrew a step, looked at his match, and throwing on his hat which had lain till now on the moss, went to work.  It was work in earnest, for minutes were limited.

‘Mr. Rollo?’ said Wych Hazel, ’I cannot draw a thing if you sit there watching me.  Just take your first position, please.’

’I should lose my point of view—­you would not ask me to do that?  Besides, you are safe—­I am wholly occupied with myself.’

’No doubt!  But if you presume to put me in your sketch I’ll turn you into a red squirrel’—­with which fierce threat Miss Hazel drooped her head till her ‘point of view’ must have been at least merged in the brim of her flat hat, and went at her drawing.  That she had merged herself as well in the interest of the game, was soon plain,—­shyness and everything else went to the winds:  only when (according to habit) some scrap of a song broke from her lips, then did she rebuke herself with an impatient gesture or exclamation, while the hat drooped lower than ever.  It was pretty to see and to hear her,—­those very outbreaks were so free and girlish and wayward, and at the same time so sweet.  Several minutes of the prescribed time slipped away.

‘How soon do you go to Chickaree?’ said the gentleman, in a pre-engaged tone, very busy with his pencil.

‘How soon?’ repeated the lady, surveying her own sketch—­’why—­ not too soon for anybody that wants me away, I suppose.  Ask Mr. Falkirk.’

‘Is it long since you have seen the place?’

’I can hardly be said to have “seen” it at all.  I think my landscape eyes were not open at that remote period of which you speak.’

’I was a red squirrel then, in the “former state” to which I referred a while ago.  So you see your late threat has no terrors for me.  Is it in process of execution?’

‘O were you?’ said Miss Hazel, absorbed in her drawing.  ’Yes—­ but the expression is very difficult!—­Did you think you knew me as a field mouse?’

He laughed a little.

’Then, I suppose you have not the pleasure of knowing your neighbours, the Marylands?—­except the specimen lately on hand?’

‘No, I have heard an account of them,’ said Miss Kennedy.  ’For shame, Mr. Rollo, Dr. Maryland isn’t a “specimen.”  He’s good.  I like him.’