She went about her day’s varied work as usual--curious to see the new acquaintance--yet in no wise excited. Vivid and animated, enthusiastic and energetic as she was in all her thoughts and ways, gushing sentimentality made no part of Miss Leland’s character. Life at Trelasco flowed with such an even monotony, there was such a dearth of new interests, that it was only natural that a girl of vivacious temper should be curious about new-comers. At St. John’s Wood every day had brought some new element into the lives of the students, and almost every day had brought a new pupil, drawn thither by the growing renown of the school, pupils from the uttermost ends of the earth sometimes, pupils of swart complexion speaking unknown tongues, pupils patrician and pupils plebeian, each and all conforming to the same stringent rules of art, spending patient months in the shading of a brace of plums or a bunch of grapes, from a plaster cast, and toiling slowly up the gradual ascent which leads to the Royal Academy and the gold medal. Many there were who sickened at the slow rate of progress and who fell away. Only the faithful remained. And this going and coming, this strife between faith and unfaith, patience and impatience, had made a perpetual movement in the life of the great school--to say nothing of such bodily activities as lawn tennis, for which the master had provided a court--a court for his girl-pupils, be it noted, where they played among themselves, as if they had been so many collegians in the college of Tennyson’s “Princess.” Allegra had liked her life at the great art school, but she had never regretted its abandonment. She loved her brother, and her brother’s wife, better even than she loved art. It was only now and then that she felt that existence at Trelasco was as monotonous as the flow of the river going up and coming down day by day between Lostwithiel and the sea. She spent the hours between breakfast and luncheon hard at work in her painting-room--a little room with a large window facing northward. She had the coachman’s girl and boy for her models, and was engaged upon a little water-colour picture after the school of Mrs. Allingham, a little picture which told its story with touching simplicity. It was not the first picture of the kind she had painted. Several of her works had been exhibited at the minor galleries which are hospitable to the new-comer in the world of art; and two small pictures had been bought at prices which seemed to promise her an easy road to fortune.