“No, they didn’t,” declared Judy.  “You just ask your grandmother.  She says nobody has to go where they don’t want to go, and I think she is right, and if those sailors had sailed away the minute they heard the Lorelei begin to sing they would have been safe.”

“Well, maybe they would,” agreed Anne, hastily, for Judy had stopped work to talk.  “Judy, I shall fall off this rock if you don’t finish pretty soon.”

“All right, Annekins, just one minute,” and Judy dashed in a drowning sailor or two, fluffed the heroine’s hair into entrancing curliness, added a few extra rays to the sparkling comb, and held up the sketch.

“There,” she said, triumphantly.

Anne slid from the rock, and waded in to look.

“It isn’t a bit like me,” she criticized, holding up her wet and flowing draperies.

“Well, you see I couldn’t put in your dimples and your chubbiness, for although they are dear in you, Anne, they are not suitable for the purposes of art,” and Judy stood back with a grown-up air and gazed upon her masterpiece.  Then she caught Anne around the waist and danced with her on the beach.

  “Ich glaube, die Wellen verschlingen
  Am Ende Schiffer und Kahn;
  Und das hat mit ihrem Singen
  Die Lorelei gethan.”

“You wicked little Lorelei,” she panted, as they sat down on the sand.

“I’m not wicked,” said Anne, composedly, “and the next time you use me for a model, Judy, I wish you would get an easier place than on that old rock.”

“You shall be Juliet in the tomb,” promised Judy, “and you can go to sleep if you want to.”

But she let Anne rest for awhile, and used Perkins as a model.

Her first sketch of him was very clever—­a sketch in which the stately butler posed as “The Neptune of the Kitchen.”  He sat on a great turtle, with a toasting-fork instead of a trident, with a necklace of oyster crackers, a crown of pickles, and a smile that was truly Perkins’s own.

That sketch taught Judy her niche in the temple of art.  She was not destined to be a great artist, but she had a keen wit, and a knack of discovering fun in everything, and in later years it was in caricature, not unkind, but truly humorous, that Judy made her greatest successes, and achieved some little fame.

CHAPTER XVIII

JUDY KEEPS A PROMISE

“What’s your talent, Anne?” asked Judy, one evening, as she lay on the couch reading “Sesame and Lilies.”  It was raining again outside, but in the fireplace a great fire was blazing, and rosy little Anne was in front of it, popping corn.

“Haven’t any,” said Anne, watching the white kernels bob up and down.  “I can’t draw and I can’t play, and I can’t sing or converse—­or anything.”

Judy looked at her thoughtfully.  “Well, we will have to find something that you can do,” she said, for Judy liked to lead and have others follow, and having decided upon art as her life-work, she wanted Anne to choose a similar path.  “I wish I could take up bookbinding or wood-carving, or—­or dentistry—­”