“My name is Lavendie,” the painter said; “my wife and I live here,” and he gave her a card.

Noel could not help answering:  “My name is Noel Pierson; I live with my father; here’s the address”—­she found her case, and fished out a card.  “My father is a clergyman; would you care to come and see him?  He loves music and painting.”

“It would be a great pleasure; and perhaps I might be allowed to paint you.  Alas!  I have no studio.”

Noel drew back.  “I’m afraid that I work in a hospital all day, and—­and I don’t want to be painted, thank you.  But, Daddy would like to meet you, I’m sure.”

The painter bowed again; she saw that he was hurt.

“Of course I can see that you’re a very fine painter,” she said quickly; “only—­only—­I don’t want to, you see.  Perhaps you’d like to paint Daddy; he’s got a most interesting face.”

The painter smiled.  “He is your father, mademoiselle.  May I ask you one question?  Why do you not want to be painted?”

“Because—­because I don’t, I’m afraid.”  She held out her hand.  The painter bowed over it.  “Au revoir, mademoiselle.”

“Thank you,” said Noel; “it was awfully interesting.”  And she walked away.  The sky had become full of clouds round the westerly sun; and the foreign crinkled tracery of the plane-tree branches against that French-grey, golden-edged mass, was very lovely.  Beauty, and the troubles of others, soothed her.  She felt sorry for the painter, but his eyes saw too much!  And his words:  “If ever you act differently from others,” made her feel him uncanny.  Was it true that people always disliked and condemned those who acted differently?  If her old school-fellows now knew what was before her, how would they treat her?  In her father’s study hung a little reproduction of a tiny picture in the Louvre, a “Rape of Europa,” by an unknown painter—­a humorous delicate thing, of an enraptured; fair-haired girl mounted on a prancing white bull, crossing a shallow stream, while on the bank all her white girl-companions were gathered, turning half-sour, half-envious faces away from that too-fearful spectacle, while one of them tried with timid desperation to mount astride of a sitting cow, and follow.  The face of the girl on the bull had once been compared by someone with her own.  She thought of this picture now, and saw her school fellows-a throng of shocked and wondering girls.  Suppose one of them had been in her position!  ’Should I have been turning my face away, like the rest?  I wouldn’t no, I wouldn’t,’ she thought; ‘I should have understood!’ But she knew there was a kind of false emphasis in her thought.  Instinctively she felt the painter right.  One who acted differently from others, was lost.

She told her father of the encounter, adding: 

“I expect he’ll come, Daddy.”

Pierson answered dreamily:  “Poor fellow, I shall be glad to see him if he does.”