"After all, there are great things left in the world for you. Painting is only one slender branch of the great tree. To-night all this may seem hard and cruel. To-morrow you will feel like a freed woman. To-morrow I shall come and talk to you again--of other things." A man of infinite tact and kindness, he spoke his message and went. The girl, with a little moan, crossed the room and threw open the window. She looked steadfastly out. Paris, always beautiful even in the darkness, glittered away to the horizon. The lights of the Champs Elysées and the Place de la Concorde, suggestive, brilliant, seductive, shone like an army of fireflies against the deep cool background of the night. She stood there with white set face and nervously clenched fingers. The echo of those kindly words seemed still to ring in her ears. She was crushed with a sense of her own terrible impotency. A failure! She must write herself down a failure! At her age, with her ambitions, with her artistic temperament and creative instincts, she was yet to be denied all coherent means of expression. She was to fall back amongst the ruck, a young woman of talent, content perhaps to earn a scanty living by painting Christmas cards, or teaching at a kindergarten. Her finger-nails dug into her flesh. It was the bitterest moment of her life. She flung herself back into the bare little room, cold, empty, comfortless. In a momentary fury she seized and tore in pieces the study which remained upon the easel. The pieces fell to the ground in a little white shower. It was the end, she told herself, fiercely. And then, as she stood there, with the fragments of the torn canvas at her feet, some even caught upon her skirt, the door was thrown open, and a girl entered humming a light tune. The newcomer stopped short upon the threshold. "Anna! What tragedy has happened, little sister? No lights, no supper, no coffee--and, above all, no Mr. Courtlaw. How dreary it all looks. Never mind. Come and help me pack. I'm off to England." "Annabel, are you mad? To England! You are joking, of course. But come in, dear. I will light the stove, and there shall be some coffee presently." "Coffee! Bah!" The newcomer picked her way across the floor with daintily uplifted skirts, and subsided into a deck chair of stretched canvas. "I will not rob you of your coffee, most dutiful of sisters!" she exclaimed. "I have had adventures--oh, more than one, I can assure you. It has been a marvellous day--and I am going to England." Anna looked at her sister gravely. Even in her painting smock and with her disarranged hair, the likeness between the two girls was marvellous. "The adventures I do not doubt, Annabel," she said. "They seem to come to you as naturally as disappointment--to other people. But to England! What has happened, then?"