Gwethyn did not greatly concern herself, for she had found three most congenial chums. Rose Randall, Beatrix Bates, and Dona Matthews were kindred spirits where fun was concerned, and in their society she spent all her spare time. As for Katrine, she was not likely to trouble about a Fourth Form girl. She just realized Githa as a plain and very objectionable junior, but never gave a thought to her or her affairs. At present Katrine's mind was devoted to art, and had no corner to spare for minor interests. Under Miss Aubrey's tuition she was making strides, and was beginning to put on her colours in a far more professional manner. She really had a decided talent for painting, as well as a love for it, and she had come prepared to work. Her teacher, glad to find such enthusiasm, gave her every encouragement. She took her out sketching daily, allowed her to watch while she herself painted, and took infinite trouble to set her in the way of real art progress. Katrine's easel had never before had so much exercise. She planted it in a variety of situations, at the instance of Miss Aubrey, whose trained eye could at once pick out suitable subjects for the brush. Heathwell was a very Paradise for artists, with its deep lanes, its hedges a tangle of honeysuckle, wild rose, and white briony, its quiet timbered farmsteads set in the midst of lush meadows, its flowery gardens, and its slow-flowing river with reedy, willowy banks. Those were halcyon days to Katrine, whether she sat in the sunshine among the pinks and pansies of a cottage garden, sketching the subtle varied stones of a weather-worn gable against the rich brown of a thatched roof, the bees humming in and out of the flowers, and the pigeons cooing gently in the dovecote close by; or whether Miss Aubrey took her to the shelter of thick woods, where the warm light, shimmering through the leaves, cast flickering shadows on the soft grass below. There were glorious mornings when Nature seemed to have washed her children's faces, and turned the world out in clean clothes; golden noons when all was a-quiver in a haze of heat, and the sky a blue dome from horizon to zenith; and still, quiet evenings, when the elms were a blot of purple-grey against a pale yellow afterglow, and the uncut hayfield such a soft, delicate, blurred mass of indefinite colour that she gave up the vain effort to depict it, and simply sat to gaze and wonder and enjoy. Down by the river the calm pools would catch the carmine of the sky, till one could fancy that one of the ten plagues had returned to earth, and that the waters were turned into blood. Each leaf of the willows seemed to reflect a shade of warmer hue, till all was bathed in a glow of ruddy light, and looking over the gently quivering reed tops to the splendour across the horizon, one could almost see angels between the cloud bars.