"It must be time to work again!" she exclaimed. "Have we been resting long, M'sieu? I feel as though I'd been asleep and you'd just awakened me." She yawned as she spoke, stretching her strong arms in a slow, wide circle, the muscles of her shoulders rounding forward and making two little hollows appear above her collar-bones. The sight aroused the artist in Archie, and he too scrambled up, and betook himself to work. The sheep and goats that he had bribed the shepherd to pasture there happened to "come" as he wanted them that evening, and he began to work away at them in silence. One of the goats, a piebald, shaggy creature, reared itself up on its hind legs, with its fore-feet against the tree trunk, and began to nibble at the foliage. Something about the pose of the creature sent a swift suggestion to Archie's mind, and he just had time to rough in the legs, with their slight outward tilt, the hoofs set firmly apart and the tail sticking out and up from the sharply curved-in rump, before the animal dropped on all fours and moved away. Archie, with the smile of the creator in his eyes, worked on, and the goat's legs merged into the beginnings of a slim human body with the hands leaning against the tree and the head, tilted on one side, peering around at the figure of Désirée. Suddenly he gave an exclamation of annoyance. "There is some one watching us from those myrtle bushes. Confound the beggar--some one from the village, I suppose." Désirée turned sharply, just in time to see a brown face grinning through the leaves. It was a face compact of curiously slanting lines--upward-twitched tufts of brows, upward wrinkles at the corners of the narrow eyes, and a slanting mouth that laughed above a pointed, thrusting chin. "That! That is only my little brother, M'sieu. It is one of God's innocents and lame on both feet. Sylvestre! Come out and speak to M'sieu--no one will hurt you." The bushes rustled and parted and an odd little figure, apparently that of a boy of about ten, came scrambling out with a queer, lungeing action from the hips. The child's legs were deformed, but he swung himself forward at a marvellous speed on a pair of clumsy crutches. Archie saw that when he was not laughing his brown eyes were wide and grave, with a look of innocence in them that contrasted oddly with the knowing gleam they showed a minute earlier. "But he is exactly what I want for the picture!" cried Archie, running his hand through the boy's tangled curls and tilting his face gently backwards. "He is exactly like the things I was telling you of. He must sit to me."