“Pretty well.” Oliver stepped back. “Like it?” he enquired politely; but he went off to unpack the luncheon basket without waiting for her answer. Justin came up and looked over her shoulder. The canvas showed an arrangement of sunshine and white flesh and red hair, with no more than a conventional resemblance to Laura, but delicate and lovely as a bunch of shaded nasturtiums. “Don’t you like it?” he asked. She chose her words. “It’s wonderful colour: like a fire-opal.” He nodded quickly. She always found the words he wanted. “That’s why I’ve bought it—at least, I’m going to—for Mother. Just the thing for the yellow parlour, isn’t it?” “Oh, yes.” She was pleased, tremendously pleased, that she was to live in Mrs. Cloud’s drawing-room. If they hung her over the mantelpiece they would see her every evening as they sat by the fire.... She thought—not because it was she herself, of course, but because it was such a good piece of work—that it ought to go over the mantelpiece.... “Wouldn’t you give your ears to draw like that?” There was a wistfulness in Justin’s voice that should have touched her. He was thinking of himself, not of her. But she, too, was thinking of herself. “I can,” said Laura absently. And then, as he laughed—“I tell you I can, Justin! I tell you I can!” “Can what?” Oliver came across to them with his hands full of fruit and green glasses and blue checked table-cloth, and sat himself down to butter rolls. “Draw,” said Laura stiffly, her eyes on the fire-opal shoulder blade. “Can you?” said Oliver in the soothing, interested voice that one uses to a child. “Well, you may laugh,” she began, but ready to laugh herself, if Justin, with a vague notion that she was making herself look foolish and a still vaguer notion that he did not like Laura to look foolish, had not interposed too peremptorily—— “Oh, dry up, Laura! Let’s have lunch,” and so set a match to her discretion. She flared. It was comical to hear the personal pique and righteous artistic wrath struggling for precedence in her harangue as she dragged out Oliver’s spare easel. “You eat your lunches! Oliver, where’s the michallet? And charcoal? And a board? You two think you know everything. You think I’m a fool. You think there’s nothing on earth but colour. Oh, I’ll show you!” And then, as the familiar delight of handling familiar tools swept over her, she suddenly added, with complete if abstracted friendliness, “Oliver—keep him quiet, won’t you?” “I’m hanged if you’re going to immortalize me,” began Justin. “Why not Oliver?” “Know you better.” She looked him up and down through narrowed lids. “A little more round to the right, please. Talk to him, Oliver.” And she settled herself to work. Justin chuckled. But Oliver, watching her curiously, noticing the business-like deftness of her preparations, turned, with a touch of discomfort, to Justin. “I say—I didn’t know——” And then, in an undertone, “Is she really any good?” Justin held out his plate.