The coachman’s children profited greatly by this new profession which had been devised for them. Allegra made their frocks in her leisure hours, when the active fingers must have something to do, while the active tongue ran on gaily in happy talk with Martin and Isola. Allegra made up to her little models for their hours of enforced idleness by extra tuition which kept them ahead of most of the other pupils in the village school; and Allegra supplied them with pocket-money. “I don’t know however the children got on before Miss Leland came,” said the coachman’s wife. “They seem to look to her for everything.” Allegra had other models, village children, and village girls--her beauty-girl, a baker’s daughter with a splendid semi-Greek face, like Mrs. Langtry’s, whom she dressed up in certain cast-off finery of her own, and painted in her genre pictures, now in this attitude, and now in that, imparting an air of distinction which elevated the Cornish peasant into a patrician. She it was, this baker’s fair-haired daughter, who stood for Allegra’s successful picture--“A daughter of the gods, divinely tall,” a little bit of finished painting which had brought the painter five and thirty guineas--boundless wealth as it seemed to her--and ever so many commissions. Art, even in despondency and failure, is a consolation; art successful is an intoxicating delight. Allegra was as happy a young woman as could be found in Cornwall that day, when she shut her colour-box, dismissed her little maiden, and ran down to lunch, where she found Isola more silent than usual, and made amends by her own light-hearted chatter for the morning’s absorption over the easel. After lunch she ran off to the village to pay her parish visits to the sick and old, and on her way to an outlying cottage she met Mr. Colfox, who immediately turned to accompany her, a way he had, but a way to which she had never attached any significance. He was a clever, well-read man, of somewhat original temper, who had to pass most of his life among unlettered or dull people; therefore it surprised Allegra in no wise that he should like to talk to her. A bright, attractive girl of three and twenty is very unsuspicious about the feelings of a homely looking man at least a dozen years her senior. “Your brother has been good enough to ask me to dinner,” he said, after a little talk about the Goodies and their ailments. “I met him at the club this morning.” “He wants you to meet Captain Hulbert. Perhaps you know him already?” “No, he has not been here within my time. He only left the navy a year ago, and he was generally stationed at the utmost ends of the earth, keeping guard over our remote possessions. Have you seen him?” “Only for an instant. He passed my sister and me yesterday evening in the moonlight. I thought he looked a nice person--but I think women have a natural leaning towards sailors. I could never imagine a seaman telling a falsehood or doing a mean action.”