“Meantime, to-day’s duties demand attention.  I have a note from Cyril Brompton requesting that special courtesy be shown by us to his friend, the new Bishop, who is in the city, and who desires to inspect the ‘Anchorage’.  Cyril declines escorting the party, because he finds it painful to meet you now, and he wishes particularly that you should show your own department.  I shall not be able to climb to the third story, while my ankles are so swollen, so I must deputize you to do the honors on your floor.  Hold yourself in readiness, if I should send for you, and do not forget to give the Bishop a package of the new prospectus of the art school.  That basket of orchids must be delivered before five o’clock.  Sister Joanna said you detained her to make a sketch of it.”

“I had almost finished when you summoned me.  Send her up for the basket in half an hour.”

The long studio was deserted, and very quiet on that sultry Saturday afternoon in midsummer, and the drowsy air was laden with fragrance from the pots of white carnations, massed on the iron balcony, upon which the tall, plate glass windows opened to the north.  Down the centre of the apartment ran a table covered with oil cloth, and on the walls hung pictures in oil, water-color, crayon, while upon brackets and pedestals were mounted plaster casts, terra cotta heads, a few bronzes, and some hammered brass plaques.  In the corners of the room, four marvels of taxidermy contributed brilliant colors mixed on the feathered palettes of a pea-fowl, a scarlet flamingo, a gold and a silver pheasant, all perched on miniature mounds, built of curious specimens of rock, of shells, coral and sphagnum.

The slow, languid swish, swish of the waters stirred by a passing steamer, broke on the cliff beyond the wall; and along the sky line where lake and atmosphere melted insensibly into blue distance, great cumulus copper-colored clouds hooded with salmon-tinted folds, tipped here and there with molten silver, shadowed with pearly hollows, hung entranced by their own image, over the inland sea that gleamed like a mirror.

At the end of the studio, near the open windows, Beryl had placed the plateau basket of orchids on the table; and she stood before an easel, transferring to the surface of a concave brass plaque, the fluted outlines of the scarlet and orange ribbons, the vivid green, purple and golden-brown lips, the rose velvet cups, the tender canary-hued calyxes of the glistening floral mass, whose aroma seemed a panting breath from equatorial jungles.  Having secured the strange forms of these vegetable simulacra of the insect world, she replaced the sheathing of tissue paper around the gorgeous mosaic of color; and just then, Sister Joanna threw open the door, and ushered in a party of visitors, consisting of two gentlemen and a lady.  One was Mr. Kendall, a member of the Chapter of Trustees.

“Good evening, Sister.  Bishop Douglass, of our State, and Miss Gordon, from the South.  I have been boasting to them of the perfect success of the ‘Anchorage’, as an industrial institution.  Will you show us some of the work done in this department?”