After he had been coming to the house two or three times a week for nearly a month she felt that she was ready for the final scene, and yet she dreaded it, she had staked so much hope upon it. It also provoked her to find that she was really afraid of him. His was such a strong, sincere nature, that she felt increasingly the wrong of trifling with it. In vain she tried to quiet herself by saying, "I do not care a straw for him, and he will soon get over his infatuation on discovering the truth." But she had a lesson to learn as well as he, for as we have intimated, unrecognized as yet, there was a process going on in her mind that in time would make strange havoc in her cold philosophy. Her heart's long winter was slowly breaking up; her girlish passion, intense as it was foolish, proved that she had a heart. Everything had been against her. Everything in her experience and education, and especially in her father's strong character and prejudices, had combined to deaden and to chill her; and had these influences continued, she would undoubtedly have become as cold and hard as some whom we find in advanced life with natures like the poles, where the ice gathers year after year, but never melts. But in Dennis Fleet she met a nature as positive as she was becoming negative. He was so warm and earnest that when she commenced to fan his love into a stronger flame for purely artistic purposes, as she vowed to herself, some sparks of the sacred fire fell on the cold altar of her own heart and slowly began to kindle. But this awakening would not now be that of a child, but of a _woman_. Therefore, Mr. Ludolph, beware! But she had yet much to learn in the hard, strange school of experience before she would truly know herself or her own needs. Success in art, however, was still her ruling passion. And though strange misgivings annoyed and perplexed her, though her respect for Dennis daily increased, and at times a sudden pity and softness made her little hands hesitate before giving an additional wrench to the rack of uncertainty upon which she kept him; still, she would not for the world have abandoned her purpose, and such compunctions were as yet but the little back eddies of the strong current. One day, in the latter part of August, Christine felt herself in the mood to give the finishing touch to the principal figure in her picture. The day was somewhat hazy, the light subdued and favorable for artistic work. Though she had prolonged Dennis's labors, to his secret delight and great encouragement, she could not keep him employed much longer. She sent for him to come over in the afternoon. "Some brackets, carvings, and pictures had come for her studio, and she wished him to put them up," she said, coolly, as he entered. He had come glowing with hope and almost assurance, for, the last time they had parted, she had dismissed him with unusual kindness. But here was one of those capricious changes again that he could not understand.