“From that day Nat was a changed boy.  He would not go to school in the afternoons, but spent the hours from two till five in drawing.  I had a cord arranged from our room to Miss Penstock’s, so that he could call her if at any moment he needed help, and she was only too glad to have him in the house.  When I reached home at six, I always found him lying back in his chair with his work spread out before him, and such a look of content and joy on his face, that more than once it made me cry instead of speaking when I bent over to kiss him.  ‘Oh, Dot—­oh, Dot!’ he used to say sometimes, ’it isn’t all for the sake of the money, splendid as that is; but I do feel as if I should yet do something much better than making designs for calicoes.  I feel it growing in me.  Oh, if I could only be taught; if there were only some one here who could tell me about the things I don’t understand!’

“‘But you shall be taught, dear,’ I replied; ’we will lay up all the money you earn.  I can earn enough for us to live on, and then, with your money, in a few years we can certainly contrive some way for you to study.’

“It seemed not too visionary a hope, for Nat’s designs grew prettier and prettier, and the agent bought all I carried him.  One week I remember he paid me thirty dollars; and as he handed it to me, seeing how pleased I looked, he said,—­

“‘Your brother is getting quite rich, is he not, Miss Kent?’ Something sinister in his smile struck me at that moment as it had not done for a long time, and I resolved to go more seldom to the office.

“We did not lay up so much as we hoped to; we neither of us had a trace of the instinct of economy or saving.  I could not help buying a geranium or fuchsia to set in the windows; Nat could not help asking me to buy a book or a picture sometimes, and his paints and pencils and brushes and paper cost a good deal in the course of six months.  Still we were very happy and very comfortable, and the days flew by.  Our little room was so cozy and pretty, that Miss Penstock’s customers used often to come in to see it; and if they happened to come when Nat was there, they almost always sent him something afterward; so, at the end of two years you never would have known the bare little room.  We had flowers in both windows, and as each window had sun, the flowers prospered; and we had a great many pretty pictures on the walls, and Nat’s sketches pinned up in all sorts of odd places.  A big beam ran across the ceiling in the middle, and that was hung full of charcoal sketches, with here and there a sheet just painted in bars of bright color—­no meaning to them, except to ‘light up,’ Nat said.  I did not understand him then, but I could see how differently all the rest looked after the scarlet and yellow were put by their side.  Some of our pictures had lovely frames to them, which Nat had carved out of old cigar-boxes that Patrick brought him.  Sometimes he used to do nothing but carve for a week, and he would say, ’Dot, I do not believe drawing is the thing I want to do, after all.  I want more; I hate to have everything flat.’  Then he would get discouraged and think all he had done was good for nothing.  ’I never can do anything except to draw till I go somewhere to be taught,’ he would say, and turn back to the old calico patterns with fresh zeal.