unopened; throwing himself intensely, recklessly, into this one single enterprise.  The fact is, he had long been starved for color and was now satiating his soul with it.  Probably it was largely impersonal with him at first.  The Bonnie Lassie, wise of heart that she is, thinks so.  But that could not last.  Men who are not otherwise safeguarded do not long retain a neutral attitude toward such creatures of grace and splendor as Bobbie Holland.

Between them developed a curious relation.  It was hardly to be called friendship; he was not, to Bobbie’s recognition, a habitant of her world.  Nor, certainly, was it anything more.  Julien would as soon have renounced easel and canvas as have taken advantage of her coming to make love to her.  In this waif of our gutters and ward of our sidewalk artist inhered a spirit of the most punctilious and rigid honor, the gift, perhaps, of some forgotten ancestry.  More and more, as the intimacy grew, he deserted his uptown haunts and stuck to the attic studio above the rooms where, in the dawning days of prosperity, he had installed Peter Quick Banta in the effete and scandalous luxury of two rooms, a bath, and a gas stove.  Yet the picture advanced slowly which is the more surprising in that the exotic Bobbie seemed to find plenty of time for sittings now.  Between visits she took to going to the Metropolitan Museum and conscientiously studying pictures and catalogues with a view to helping her protege form sound artistic tastes. (When the Bonnie Lassie heard that, she all but choked.) As for Julien!

“This is all very well,” he said, one day in the sculptress’s studio; “but sooner or later she’s going to catch me at it.”

“What then?” asked the Bonnie Lassie, not looking up from her work.

“She’ll go away.”

“Let her go.  Your portrait will be finished meantime, won’t it?”

“Oh, yes.  That’ll be finished.”

This time the Bonnie Lassie did look up.  Immediately she looked back again.

“In any case she’ll have to go away some day—­won’t she?”

“I suppose so,” returned he in a gloomy growl.

“I warned you at the outset, ‘Dangerous,’” she pointed out.

They let it drop there.  As for the effect upon the girl of Julien Tenny’s brilliant and unsettling personality, I could judge only as I saw them occasionally together, she lustrous and exotic as a budding orchid, he in the non-descript motley of his studio garb, serenely unconscious of any incongruity.

“Do you think,” I asked the Bonnie Lassie, who was sharing my bench one afternoon as Julien was taking the patroness of Art over to where her car waited, “that she is doing him as much good as she thinks she is, or ought to?”

“Malice ill becomes one of your age, Dominie,” said the Bonnie Lassie with dignity.

“I’m quite serious,” I protested.

“And very unjust.  Bobbie is an adorable little person, when you know her.”