The young man accepted the employment, but disdained himself for accepting it, until there came an angel into the painting-room one day to take the painter's soul captive, and reconcile him to any lot that brought him near her. The angel was Florence, only child and spoiled darling of William Crawford, who came to ask her father for a check for her milliner. She was an angel with a tiny _retroussé_ nose, and dark-grey eyes, that were generally mistaken for black; an impulsive angel with a temper that was more capricious than an April day. For some time after that meeting in the painting-room, Philip believed that he admired Miss Crawford only as the most beautiful thing he had ever seen; but he woke one day to the knowledge that he loved her to distraction, and that the happiness of his life was as utterly at her mercy as the little golden toys hanging from her chatelaine, which she had so pretty a trick of trifling with when she talked to him. Of all men upon earth, perhaps William Crawford was the least tainted by any odour of snobbishness. No intoxicating sense of triumph bewildered him on the giddy height to which he had risen. He stood serene upon the mountain top; for he looked upward to the starry Valhalla of dead painters--whose glory seemed as high above him as the stars in which he could fancy them dwelling--and not downward to the struggling wayfarers he had left behind him. "If people knew as much about painting as I do, they wouldn't believe in my pictures," said Mr. Crawford.