that was fairly devouring in its intensity.  When she was ten she “drew” the cat and the dog, the hens and chickens, and colored the sketches with the paints her mother provided.  Whatever appealed to her sense of beauty was straightway transferred to paper or canvas.  Then for the three years before her mother’s death there had been surreptitious lessons from a Portland teacher, paid for out of Mr. Lord’s house allowance; for one of his chief faults was an incredible parsimony, amounting almost to miserliness.

“Something terrible will happen to Olive if she isn’t taught to use her talent,” Mrs. Lord pleaded to her husband.  “She is wild to know how to do things.  She makes effort after effort, trembling with eagerness, and when she fails to reproduce what she sees, she works herself into a frenzy of grief and disappointment.”

“You’d better give her lessons in self-control,” Mr. Lord answered.  “They are cheaper than instruction in drawing, and much more practical.”

So Olive lived and struggled and grew; and luckily her talent was such a passion that no circumstances could crush or extinguish it.  She worked, discovering laws and making rules for herself, since she had no helpers.  When she could not make a rabbit or a bird look “real” on paper, she searched in her father’s books for pictures of its bones.  “If I could only know what it is like inside, Cyril,” she said, “perhaps its outside wouldn’t look so flat!  O!  Cyril, there must be some better way of doing; I just draw the outline of an animal and then I put hairs or feathers on it.  They have no bodies.  They couldn’t run nor move; they’re just pasteboard.”

“Why don’t you do flowers and houses, Olive?” inquired Cyril solicitously.  “And people paint fruit, and dead fish on platters, and pitchers of lemonade with ice in,—­why don’t you try things like those?”

“I suppose they’re easier,” Olive returned with a sigh, “but who could bear to do them when there are living, breathing, moving things; things that puzzle you by looking different every minute?  No, I’ll keep on trying, and when you get a little older we’ll run away together and live and learn things by ourselves, in some place where father can never find us!”

“He wouldn’t search, so don’t worry,” replied Cyril quietly, and the two looked at each other and knew that it was so.

There, in the cedar hollow, then, lived Olive Lord, an angry, resentful, little creature weighed down by a fierce sense of injury.  Her gloomy young heart was visited by frequent storms and she looked as unlovable as she was unloved.  But Nancy Carey, never shy, and as eager to give herself as people always are who are born and bred in joy and love, Nancy hopped out of Mother Carey’s warm nest one day, and fixing her bright eyes and sunny, hopeful glance on the lonely, frowning little neighbor, stretched out her hand in friendship.  Olive’s mournful black eyes met Nancy’s sparkling brown ones.  Her hand, so marvellously full of skill, had never held another’s, and she was desperately self-conscious; but magnetism flowed from Nancy as electric currents from a battery.  She drew Olive to her by some unknown force and held her fast, not realizing at the moment that she was getting as much as she gave.