It was hard on them both--on the girl that she could not have, on the mother that she could not give! Rosalind from this time forth kept silence about her art, because she knew that it was useless to hope for the impossible--kept silence, that is, from all but one person. And yet she could not keep her thoughts from flying ever and again to the art-classes and the twenty pounds which would do so much for her. So up in the room at the top of the house, where she dabbled among her scanty paints and sketched out pictures in any colours that she happened to have, and even went so far in the way of economy as to utilize the leavings of her mother’s decorative paints--hedge-sparrow’s-egg-blue, Arabian brown, eau de Nil, Gobelin, and others equally unsuitable for her purpose,--Rosalind Mackenzie dreamed dreams and saw visions--visions of a great day when she would have paints in profusion and art-teaching galore. There was not the smallest prospect of her dreams and visions coming true, any more than, without teaching and without paints, there was of her daubs growing into pictures, and finding places on the line at the Academy and the New. It is always so with youth. It hopes and hopes against hope, and when hope is dead, there is no longer any youth; it is dead too. "There are youthful dreamers, Building castles fair, with stately stairways; Asking blindly Of the Future what it cannot give them." CHAPTER II But there was one person to whom Rosalind Mackenzie poured out all that was in her mind,--that was her ten-year-old sister, Nannie. In Nannie she found a ready and a sympathetic listener; moreover, in Nannie’s mind there was no doubt, no hesitation in believing that if Rosalind only had that twenty pounds there would be nothing to keep her back, nothing to prevent her sailing on right ahead into the roseate realms of fame and glory! If only she had that twenty pounds! Now Nannie undoubtedly had a very gay and jovial disposition. She was always ready for fun and excitement, and had no tendency or any desire to carve out a line for herself, as her brother and sister had both had before they had reached her age. Yet she had what was better in many people’s eyes, a very tender heart and a very affectionate nature; and her tender heart was wrung and wrung again at the thought of her sister’s unsatisfied longings and the great future that was being blighted, all for the want of twenty pounds.