To Margaret Richard’s installation in the empty room, where as a child she had always been afraid to go, was the single important break she could remember in the monotony of her existence; and now a vague yearning for companionship, the blind sense of the plant reaching towards the sunshine, drew her there.  The tacitly prescribed half hour often lengthened to an hour.  Sometimes Margaret brought a book with her, or a piece of embroidery, and the two spoke scarcely ten words, Richard giving her a smile now and then, and she returning a sympathetic nod as the cast came out successfully.

Margaret at fifteen—­she was fifteen now—­was not a beauty.  There is the loveliness of the bud and the loveliness of the full-blown flower; but Margaret as a blossom was not pretty.  She was awkward and angular, with prominent shoulder-blades, and no soft curves anywhere in her slimness; only her black hair, growing low on the forehead, and her eyes were fine.  Her profile, indeed, with the narrow forehead and the sensitive upper lip, might fairly have suggested the mask of Clytie which Richard had bought of an itinerant image-dealer, and fixed on a bracket over the mantel-shelf.  But her eyes were her specialty, if one may say that.  They were fringed with such heavy lashes that the girl seemed always to be in half-mourning.  Her smile was singularly sweet and bright, perhaps because it broke through so much somber coloring.

If there was a latent spark of sentiment between Richard and Margaret in those earlier days, neither was conscious of it; they had seemingly begun where happy lovers generally end,—­by being dear comrades.  He liked to have Margaret sitting there, with her needle flashing in the sunlight, or her eyelashes making a rich gloom above the book as she read aloud.  It was so agreeable to look up from his work, and not be alone.  He had been alone so much.  And Margaret found nothing in the world pleasanter than to sit there and watch Richard making his winter garden, as she called it.  By and by it became her custom to pass every Saturday afternoon in that employment.

Margaret was not content to be merely a visitor; she took a housewifely care of the workshop, resolutely straightening out its chronic disorder at unexpected moments, and fighting the white dust that settled upon everything.  The green-paper shade, which did not roll up very well, at the west window was of her devising.  An empty camphor vial on Richard’s desk had always a clove pink, or a pansy, or a rose, stuck into it, according to the season.  She hid herself away and peeped out in a hundred feminine things in the room.  Sometimes she was a bit of crochet-work left on a chair, and sometimes she was only a hair-pin, which Richard gravely picked up and put on the mantel-piece.

Mr. Slocum threw no obstacles in the path of this idyllic friendship; possibly he did not observe it.  In his eyes Margaret was still a child,—­a point of view that necessarily excluded any consideration of Richard.  Perhaps, however, if Mr. Slocum could have assisted invisibly at a pretty little scene which took place in the studio, one day, some twelve or eighteen months after Margaret’s first visit to it, he might have found food for reflection.