Their windows looked into a deep courtyard formed by a triangle of tall brick houses,--the rears of houses on Charles and Brimmer Streets, the fronts of three quaint Italianate red-brick dwellings,--all enclosing a tiny greensward on which slender poplars rustled their glossy leaves. In the farthest corner of this court rise the walls and mullioned windows of the Church of the Advent, and on mild evenings when casements were open, the thrush-like voices of the choir boys over the melodious thunder of great organ floated up to these windows. But I was never able to observe that it produced any pietistic tone in number 94. On the contrary they affected to take a lively interest in the upper windows of the houses opposite and threatened to keep a pair of field glasses on their window sill. As you go down Pinckney Street to the river you pass a break in the solid row of house fronts through which you can look up and see the two windows of that fifth-floor-back. One always did look, and if they were lighted, it was impossible not to go up; for in that room there was always some form of what is technically known as "trouble." I never pass the spot now without looking up to see if there is a light in those windows.... They are dark. * * * * * On the walls of the room were two paintings by Fritz; student works. One was a small landscape sketch--smouldering red of a sunset after rain, burning through ragged drab clouds over a hill country bathed in violet mists of twilight. It was modest, quiet. There was a strain of thoughtful poetry in it. But the striking part was its sincerity. There was none of that striving after effect, that ambitious rhetoric which youngsters usually mistake for eloquence: no attempt to make the scene anything more than what it was. The other was a portrait study of a workman naked to the waist. It was bold, vigorous, masculine, and overflowing with the joy of bodily health. So far so good. But something else was in store. Out of the canvases stacked against the wall he dug a study of a woman's head in profile. One looked; and then looked again. "Who was she?" She had come to the school as a model for one week: that was all they knew. But her secret was on this canvas. She must have been in her early thirties. Her face was quite serene. It was the serenity of a place reduced to ashes. Utter resignation. "Endure. Life has done its worst." By what divination had this youngster of twenty-four guessed a secret like that? From that moment it was clear to me that he was a portrait painter. "What," I asked, "is that little star in the lower corner of the canvas?" "That? Oh," he explained diffidently, "that is put on pictures which the school saves for its exhibition." III