The two people upon the Neapolitan steamer had met for the first time in the great dining-room one noon of June. It was at a farmer's dinner of beef, potatoes and dandelion-greens, finished with a sort of machicolated decoration of square pieces of rhubarb pie set beside each plate in saucers--nicked saucers, whereon indigo mandarins floated airily over sky-blue hills on their pious way from one indigo pagoda to another. Dancing vines at the open windows spread quaint, shifting embroidery over the coarse tablecloth, yellow walls and unpainted floor. The drowsy hum of bees was heard above the iron clatter of knives and forks. Sweet incense of myriad rose-censers floated above the vulgar odors of the meal, and the open doorway with its flat white doorstone was a picture-frame sculptured in foliage and bloom around a foreground of wild garden, of black sea-weed and sea-shell, roughened rocks, and then a borderless stretch of blue glittering sea and sky. There were half a dozen men and women around the table, who chanced at the moment the new boarder appeared to be elevating half a dozen noses in the air before the alkaline fumes of the hot biscuits. She was rather a pretty little thing, with blue eyes, a collar all awry, and the headless, leafless stalks of what had once been red roses standing up valiantly in her brown hair. "What a flutter-budget!" he thought as he saw by the swift, birdlike motion of her head that indeed flowers must needs have more than flower-like frames to remain long undecapitated amid all that breeziness. And indeed "flutter-budget" was not amiss as a descriptive word for her who sang oftener than she spoke, because it was her nature to, and who danced more naturally than she walked, because God had made her so. It was rather ridiculous to think of her painting pictures. One could scarcely imagine her doing anything that required a moment's repose, and therefore was not unnatural the remark whispered by the monochromatic Miss Grey into the ear of the water-colored Miss Bray as the newcomer floated to her seat: "_She_ paint! Mmnph! I wouldn't trust her to paint a yellow dog!" Miss Grey, by the by, didn't paint: she only taught Art in five lessons at seventy-five cents a lesson. But the monochromatic maiden was right. Annie Deane would have made a queer mess of painting a yellow dog. But if one chose to give her an order for a flower-piece, then would be seen how she rivalled the pearly finish of Nature--how she gathered the rare tints, the marvellous transparencies and shadows, the breath-broken dewiness, almost even the fragrance of field and garden favorites, upon her paper. Thus in time even the yellow-dog sceptic was brought to realize that there are artistic triumphs even for one who quails and cowers before the ochreous canine. "Shall I help you to some more of the greens?" were his first words to her, seeing her indigo mandarins loom up dimly from her nearly empty plate.