It was on Saturday afternoon that Bernard Cameron called. Doris had been through a particularly trying morning. It began with a letter from Alice, evidently written at her brother’s instigation, advising her to give up the business of making sham oil-paintings and thus defrauding the public. "Better to be poor and honest and honourable," wrote Alice, virtuously. Doris read between the lines that her brother wished her to say these words, and that annoyed her extremely. "What business is it of his?" she said to herself, resenting his interference. When she went upstairs to the garret, to begin work for the day, she accidentally overheard Sandy saying to his fellow-worker, "Ain’t folks simple to buy these for genuine oil-paintings? I know a chap who gave three pounds for a pair of them at a shop. And, says he, them’s real oil-paintings. As proud as a peacock he was!" "He shouldn’t have been so green," said the other youth. "The Government is down on folks who sell margarine for butter; it can’t be done now-a-days, but there don’t seem to be no penalty for this sort of thing!" He tapped one of the pictures meaningly. Doris entered, and the conversation ceased; but all the morning her assistants’ words and Alice’s letter rankled in her mind. No doubt the business was not by any means a high-class one, but no one would buy her genuine paintings, she therefore told herself she was driven to make what she could sell: and now she had quite a nice little sum already in hand, to form the nucleus of what she would require to pay the debt to Bernard Cameron. However, it was rather too much for her, when, as she was snatching a hasty lunch in the little sitting-room, she overheard Sam Austin saying to his mother in the kitchen, "Mother, I used to think them pictures Miss Anderson made so fast were really beautiful, and my wife went and bought one at a shop, but when the Vicar was in our house the other day, and she was showing it to him, he says, ’My good woman, that’s no more a work of art than that stocking you are knitting, and it isn’t half so useful! Don’t you waste your money over such stuff!’ says he. I felt so ashamed-like, mother, that our young lady’s work should be so spoken of. And the Vicar is a gentleman who knows what’s what." "Hush, Sam! Miss Anderson is in the room, and she might hear. I am sure she thinks they are all right and worth the money, or she would not do them."