“Yes, they do; and I wondered if it was only because you were young.  But those I did when I was young are almost the same as the ones I paint now.  I haven’t learned much.  There hasn’t been any one to show me!  And you can’t learn from print, never!  Yet I’ve grown in what I see—­ grown so that the world is full of beauty to me that I never dreamed of seeing when I began.  But I can’t paint it—­I can’t get it on the canvas.  Ah, I think I might have known how to, if I hadn’t had to teach myself, if I could only have seen how some of the other fellows did their work.  If I’d ever saved money to get away from Canaan —­if I could have gone away from it and come back knowing how to paint it—­if I could have got to Paris for just one month!  Paris—­for just one month!”

“Perhaps we will; you can’t tell what may happen.”  It was always her reply to this cry of his.

“Paris—­for just one month!” he repeated, with infinite wistfulness, and then realizing what an old, old cry it was with him, he shook his head, impatiently sniffing out a laugh at himself, rose and went pottering about among the canvases, returning their faces to the wall, and railing at them mutteringly.

“Whatever took me into it, I don’t know.  I might have done something useful.  But I couldn’t bring myself ever to consider doing anything else—­ I couldn’t bear even to think of it!  Lord forgive me, I even tried to encourage your father to paint.  Perhaps he might as well, poor boy, as to have put all he’d made into buying Jonas out.  Ah me!  There you go, `Flower-Girls’!  Turn your silly faces to the wall and smile and cry there till I’m gone and somebody throws you on a bonfire.  I’ll never look at you again.”  He paused, with the canvas half turned.  “And yet,” he went on, reflectively, “a man promised me thirty-five dollars for that picture once.  I painted it to order, but he went away before I finished it, and never answered the letters I wrote him about it.  I wish I had the money now—­perhaps we could have more than two meals a day.”

“We don’t need more,” said Ariel, scraping the palette attentively.  “It’s healthier with only breakfast and supper.  I think I’d rather have a new dress than dinner.”

“I dare say you would,” the old man mused.  “You’re young—­you’re young.  What were you doing all this afternoon, child?”

“In my room, trying to make over mamma’s wedding-dress for to-night.”

“To-night?”

“Mamie Pike invited me to a dance at their house.”

“Very well; I’m glad you’re going to be gay,” he said, not seeing the faintly bitter smile that came to her face.

“I don’t think I’ll be very gay,” she answered.

“I don’t know why I go—­nobody ever asks me to dance.”

“Why not?” he asked, with an old man’s astonishment.