“Now, Ellen, be a good girl,” she said as she set about picking up the various articles she had been using in the baby’s bath and dressing.  “Charlotte’s in a hurry.”

The door-bell rang.  Celia was in the kitchen, stirring up a pudding.  It was April now, and Celia’s knee was so far mended that she could be about the house without her crutches, with certain restrictions as to standing, or using the knee in any way likely to strain it.

It was Charlotte who did the running about, and it was she who started for the door now, after casting one hasty look around the bath-room to make sure that the baby could do herself no harm.

Left to herself, Ellen investigated the resources of the bath-room and found them wanting.  After she had thrown two towels, the soap and her own small tooth brush back into the tub from which she had lately emerged, and which Charlotte had not yet emptied, she found her means of entertainment at an end.  The other toilet articles were all beyond her reach.  She gazed out of the window; there was nothing moving to be seen but a row of Mrs. Fields’s dish-towels waving in the wind.

She turned to the door.  Charlotte had meant to latch it, but it was a door with a peculiar trick of swinging slowly open an inch after it had apparently been closed, and it had not been latched.  Ellen pushed one small hand into the crack and pulled it open.

Charlotte was nowhere to be seen or heard Across the hall was the door of her room, ajar; and since doors ajar have somehow a singular charm for babies, this one crossed to it and swung it wide.

Here was richness.  This was Charlotte’s workshop.  She slept in a smaller room adjoining, the baby in the crib by her side; and with that smaller room little Ellen was familiar, but not with this.  The tiny feet travelled eagerly about, from one desirable object to another.  And presently she remembered the big, porcelain-lined bath-tub, There was nothing Ellen liked so well as to throw things into that tub and see them splash.

Two books crossed the hall and made the plunge, one after the other, into the soapy water.  Ellen gurgled with delight.  Two more journeys deposited a shoe, a hair-brush and a small box, contents unknown, in the watery receptacle.  Then Ellen made a discovery which filled her small soul with joy.

Just two days before, Charlotte had completed the set of colour drawings which delineated the wall decoration of four rooms—­a “den,” a dining-room and two bedrooms.  They represented the work of the winter, pursued under the exceeding difficulties of managing a household, and, for the last three months, caring in part for a little child.

But Charlotte had toiled faithfully, with the ardour of one who, having only a small portion of time to give to a beloved pursuit, works at it all the more zealously.  And she had gone on from one room to another, in her designing, with the hope that if in one she failed to please those upon whom her success depended, some one of the series might appeal to them, and give her the desired place in their interest.