The studio was a great room which had originally been devoted to no less prosaic an occupation than the painting of oil-cloth carpeting, great splashes of color, which time and dust had softened into a pleasing dimness, remaining to testify to its former character. It stood down among the wharves of old Salem, a town where even the new is scarcely to be distinguished from the old, and Tom had been delighted with its roomy quiet, the play of light and shadow among the bare beams overhead, and the ease with which he had been able to make it serve his purpose. He had done comparatively little toward furnishing it for his summer occupancy. He had hung a few worn-out seines over the high beams, and placed here and there his latest acquisitions in the way of bric-à-brac, while numerous sketches were pinned to the walls with no attempt at order. On the door he had fastened a zither, of which the strings were struck by nicely balanced hammers when the door was moved, and in the still rather barn-like room, he had established himself to teach and to paint through the summer months. "I cannot make it out at all," Celia said at last, turning away from the easel and walking toward Claymore. "It looks older and stronger than Ralph, as if-- Ah!" she interrupted herself suddenly, a new light breaking in her face. "Now I see! You have been painting his possibilities. You are making a portrait of him as he will be." "As he may be," Claymore corrected her, his words showing that her conjecture was in truth the key to the riddle. "When I began to paint Ralph, I was at once struck by the undeveloped state of his face. It seemed to me like a bud that had n't opened; and I began at once to try and guess what it would grow into. I did n't at first mean to paint it so, but the notion mastered me, and now I deliberately give myself up to the impulse. I don't know whether it's professional, but it is great fun." Celia went back and looked at the picture once more, but she soon returned to stand leaning upon the tall back of the chair in which her betrothed was sitting. "It is getting too dark to see it," she remarked; "but your experiment interests me wonderfully. You say you are painting what his face may be; why not what his face must be?" "Because," the artist replied, "I am trying to get in the best of his possibilities; to paint the noblest there is in him. How can I tell if he will in life realize it? He may develop his worst side, you know, instead of his best." Celia was silent a moment. The darkness seemed to have gathered quickly, rising clouds cutting off the light of the after-glow which had followed the sunset with delusive promise. She leaned forward and laid her finger-tips lightly upon Tom's forehead with a caressing motion. "You are a clever man," she said. "It is fortunate you are a good one."