“If you’ll come to St. Barnaby next summer, you shall have all the winter you want,” said Alma.

“I can’t let you slander St. Barnaby in that way,” said Beaton, with the air of wishing to be understood as meaning more than he said.

“Yes?” returned Alma, coolly.  “I didn’t know you were so fond of the climate.”

“I never think of it as a climate.  It’s a landscape.  It doesn’t matter whether it’s hot or cold.”

“With the thermometer twenty below, you’d find that it mattered,” Alma persisted.

“Is that the way you feel about St. Barnaby, too, Mrs. Leighton?” Beaton asked, with affected desolation.

“I shall be glad enough to go back in the summer,” Mrs. Leighton conceded.

“And I should be glad to go now,” said Beaton, looking at Alma.  He had the dummy of ‘Every Other Week’ in his hand, and he saw Alma’s eyes wandering toward it whenever he glanced at her.  “I should be glad to go anywhere to get out of a job I’ve undertaken,” he continued, to Mrs. Leighton.  “They’re going to start some sort of a new illustrated magazine, and they’ve got me in for their art department.  I’m not fit for it; I’d like to run away.  Don’t you want to advise me a little, Mrs. Leighton?  You know how much I value your taste, and I’d like to have you look at the design for the cover of the first number:  they’re going to have a different one for every number.  I don’t know whether you’ll agree with me, but I think this is rather nice.”

He faced the dummy round, and then laid it on the table before Mrs. Leighton, pushing some of her work aside to make room for it and standing over her while she bent forward to look at it.

Alma kept her place, away from the table.

“Mah goodness!  Ho’ exciting!” said Miss Woodburn.  “May anybody look?”

“Everybody,” said Beaton.

“Well, isn’t it perfectly choming!” Miss Woodburn exclaimed.  “Come and look at this, Miss Leighton,” she called to Alma, who reluctantly approached.

“What lines are these?” Mrs. Leighton asked, pointing to Beaton’s pencil scratches.

“They’re suggestions of modifications,” he replied.

“I don’t think they improve it much.  What do you think, Alma?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said the girl, constraining her voice to an effect of indifference and glancing carelessly down at the sketch.  “The design might be improved; but I don’t think those suggestions would do it.”

“They’re mine,” said Beaton, fixing his eyes upon her with a beautiful sad dreaminess that he knew he could put into them; he spoke with a dreamy remoteness of tone—­his wind-harp stop, Wetmore called it.

“I supposed so,” said Alma, calmly.

“Oh, mah goodness!” cried Miss Woodburn.  “Is that the way you awtusts talk to each othah?  Well, Ah’m glad Ah’m not an awtust—­unless I could do all the talking.”

“Artists cannot tell a fib,” Alma said, “or even act one,” and she laughed in Beaton’s upturned face.