“I don’t think I can do it; but if it will please you, Miss Margaret, I will try.” “Oh, I know you can do it,” Margaret cried. “Oh, tell me what to bring for you--water? You have left your big book down-stairs, but I will run and fetch it, and the pencils, and--” “Miss Margaret, I cannot let you wait upon me.” “Oh, but I will, though; I like it. Fancy! when you are going to paint papa for me,” cried Margaret, flying down-stairs. She came up again, breathless, laughing and glowing, before he could think what was the right thing to do. “There it is,” she said, putting down the sketching-block before him, “and I will bring the water in a moment. You are not to stir. Oh, Mr. Glen, think what it will be to have a picture of papa!” “But I cannot, indeed, make a picture of him. I cannot draw the figure; it is quite difficult. I am not so clever as you think,” cried Rob, with sudden fright. Margaret, carried away by the flutter of haste and pleasure, and half-childish familiar acquaintance, put up her hand as if to stop his mouth. What wonder if Rob almost forgot himself. He half put out his hand to take hers, and he raised his eyes to hers with a look which somehow stopped the girl. She did not understand it, but it frightened her. She drew a little farther away, and her usual blush rushed over her face in a flood of color. “That will be the best place to sit,” she said, half abashed, she could not tell why. And Rob remembered himself, and took his place as she indicated. She stood by him, the most eager, watchful attendant. When she had got everything he could want, she put herself behind him, watching over his shoulder every line he drew. This was bad for the drawing; but it was wonderfully enchanting and inspiring for the young man thus elevated into an artist, a genius, a creator. He felt her hand upon his chair, he felt her breath as she bent over him, a kind of perfumed atmosphere of her enveloped him. Her eagerness grew as lines began to come on the paper, he hardly knew how, her voice ran on close by his ear with exclamations and broken notes of soft, subdued sound, half a whisper, half a cry. “Oh, is that how you begin?” Margaret cried; “me, I would have thought the chair first. Oh! that is his face and the line of the hair--yes; but what do you make that dot for in the middle? there is no spot there.” “You know we must measure the lines, and see that one is in proportion with the other,” said Rob, holding up his pencil as a level; “it would not do to make one part larger than the other. I might take all my paper for one arm if I did not measure; and that is what beginners often do.”