But the dame of Highcourt, though in her seventies, had a longer and quicker sight than even Mr. Brooke himself; she had a larger experience in the misdeeds of the young; it was she, not the sculptor, who had spied those sandalled feet winging toward the tomato plants. And indeed she was a valiant little old person, whom life had trained to all sorts of ready readjustments. Long before Mr. Brooke had worked himself up to anywhere near the height of passion he fully intended to reach, Madam Randolph had viewed the situation by and large, and had resolved it into its elements. With a singular phrase, borrowed no doubt from her grandchildren, she pulled our sculptor down on his haunches, so to speak; she stayed his hand in midair. “Cut it out, old dear,” she said soothingly, as if she were reining in her favorite thoroughbred. “And oh, won’t you please, _please_, stop, look, listen? Mr. Brooke, Mr. Brooke, can’t you see what it looks like? Dear sculptor-in-wrath, it’s my father, Dad to the life; it is, indeed, Captain Carteret! Ask any one who ever saw him. All it needs is the uniform!” And she brandished in triumph before Mr. Brooke the dim daguerreotype he had just refused to consider. Well, what can we all do when events literally leap out of our hands, and shape themselves firmly, in defiance of our ethics and ultimatums? An old lady and a piece of clay are matters to be considered; they are curiously frail things under our fingers; we shall not shatter them unnecessarily. Mr. Brooke saw that Madam Randolph was right, in the main; and when she said, in a voice trembling between laughter and tears, “You will add years to my life if you do what I ask,” what could he do but yield? There were to be two portraits, then; that was settled. The lady’s would be in marble, the officer’s in bronze; Raymond’s genius for clay had arranged it. But Mr. Brooke, for all Madam Randolph’s challenging eyes, refused to model those moustaches in her presence. “No doubt my boy Raymond might do it,” he said, with a slight acerbity. “He appears to have the soul of a barber.” He was still smarting a little from the profanation of his own sacred handiwork; one did not expect a woman to understand how one felt about such things. Who shall measure man’s ingratitude? Was Raymond ever congratulated upon his own small part in that day’s playlet? Not at all. Behind the tomato plants, in the cool of the evening, could be heard the lamentations of a small boy; and behind the small boy—but I make an end.