By this time she had hung her tam-o'-shanter and jacket on a nail that she had found in the bark over her head, and was arranging her hair. "It's just like life, Oliver, isn't it?" she said, as she tightened the coil in her neck. "All we want, after all, is a place to get into out of the storm and wet, not a big place, either." "What kind of a place?" He was on his knees digging a little trench with his knife, piling up the moist earth in miniature embankments, so that the dripping from the roof would not spatter this Princess of his whom he had saved from the tempest outside. "Oh, any kind of a place if you have people you're fond of. I'd love a real studio somewhere, and a few things hung about--some old Delft and one or two bits of stuff--and somebody to take care of me." Oliver shifted his pipe in his mouth and looked up. Would she, with all her independence, really like to have someone take care of her? He had seen no evidence of it. "Who?" he asked. He had never heard her mention anybody's name--but then she had not told him everything; He had dropped his eyes again, finishing the drain and flattening the boughs under her, to make the seat the easier. "Oh, some old woman, perhaps, like dear old Mrs. Mulligan." There was no coquetry in her tone. She was speaking truthfully out of her heart. "Anything more?" Oliver's voice had lost its buoyancy now. The pipe was upside down, the ashes falling on his shirt. "Yes--lots of portraits to paint." "And a medal at the Salon?" asked Oliver, brushing off the waste of his pipe from his coat-sleeve. "Yes, I don't mind, if my pictures deserve it," and she looked at him quizzically, while a sudden flash of humor lightened up her face. "What would you want, Mr. Happy-go-lucky, if you had your wish?" "I, Madge, dear?" he exclaimed, with a sudden outburst of tenderness, raising his body erect and looking earnestly into her eyes, which were now within a hand's breadth of his own. She winced a little, but it did not offend her, nor did she move an inch. "Oh, I don't know what I want. What I want, I suppose, is what I shall never have, little girl." She wasn't his little girl, or anybody else's, she thought to herself--she was firmly convinced of that fact. It was only one of his terms of endearment. He had them for everybody--even for Hank and for Mrs. Taft--whom he called "Taffy," and who loved to hear him say it, and she old enough to be his grandmother! She stole a look into his face. There was a cloud over it, a slight knitting of the brows, and a pained expression about the mouth that were new to her. "I'd like to be a painter," he continued, "but mother would never consent." As he spoke, he sank back from her slowly, his knees still bent under him. Then he added, with a sigh, "She wouldn't think it respectable. Anything but a painter, she says."