"I am willing to do more than you ask, and if you insist on it I will efface your image, although I should much regret to do so." "I protest against that," cried Mr. Eltinge. "So far from spoiling the picture, your being there makes it invaluable to me. I'm going to tax Mr. Van Berg's generosity, and ask for this in the hope that he will make another drawing of the old man and the tree only, for you." "Would you like to have it so very much?" said Ida, much pleased with this arrangement. "Yes, my dear, very much indeed, and I'll place it near my favorite chimney corner, where I can see you all winter. Mr. Van Berg, I congratulate you; I'm not much of a judge of art, but this is my little friend here, true to life. You have been very happy in catching the expression which I am learning to know so well." "Your words have a fuller meaning than you think," replied the artist, heartily. "I have indeed been very happy in my work. I never enjoyed a morning more in my life." "But I'm to go home without any picture," said Ida, trying to hide her pleasure by assumed reproachfulness. "There is no picture yet, for any one," he answered, "this is only a sketch from which I shall try to make two pictures that will suggest a scene particularly attractive to one of my calling, to say the least." As he placed the sketch in his book, the work he had been engaged on that morning when Ida met him by the roadside, dropped out, and she saw herself leaning on the baluster rail of the staircase, with her hand half extended as a token of forgiveness and reconciliation. Her cheeks flushed instantly, but she was able to remark quietly: "I suppose that is the way you artists keep a memorandum of current events." He replied gravely, but with some answering color also: "Yes, Miss Mayhew, when the current is deep and strong." Van Berg felt himself happy in securing from Mr. Eltinge an invitation to come again. As they were riding home, Ida remarked, shyly: "I did not know you could draw so well." "Nor did I either before. That old garden is enchanted ground." "Yes," said Ida, "poor Eve was driven out of the Garden of Eden, but I feel as if I had found my way into it. I only wish I could stay there," and her sigh was long and deep. "Does the world outside seem very full of thorns and thistles?" he asked, kindly. After a moment she replied, simply and briefly, "Yes." He looked at her sympathetically for a moment, and then said earnestly: "Miss Ida, pardon me if I venture a prediction. Wherever you dwell, hereafter, all that is good and beautiful in life and character which the garden typifies will begin to take the place of thorns and thistles."