I looked at the girl. Her eyes were full of tears, either called forth by the picture itself or by the pleasure of finding Percivale’s work appreciated by me, who had spoken so hardly of the others. “I cannot tell you how glad I am that you like it,” she said. “Like it!” I returned; “I am simply delighted with it, more than I can express--so much delighted that if I could have this alongside of it, I should not mind hanging that other--that hopeless garret--on the most public wall I have.” “Then,” said Wynnie bravely, though in a tremulous voice, “you confess--don’t you, papa?--that you were _too_ hard on Mr. Percivale at first?” “Not too hard on his picture, my dear; and that was all he had yet given me to judge by. No man should paint a picture like that. You are not bound to disseminate hopelessness; for where there is no hope there can be no sense of duty.” “But surely, papa, Mr. Percivale has _some_ sense of duty,” said Wynnie in an almost angry tone. “Assuredly my love. Therefore I argue that he has some hope, and therefore, again, that he has no right to publish such a picture.” At the word _publish_ Percivale smiled. But Wynnie went on with her defence: “But you see, papa, that Mr. Percivale does not paint such pictures only. Look at the other.” “Yes, my dear. But pictures are not like poems, lying side by side in the same book, so that the one can counteract the other. The one of these might go to the stormy Hebrides, and the other to the Vale of Avalon; but even then I should be strongly inclined to criticise the poem, whatever position it stood in, that had _nothing_--positively nothing--of the aurora in it.”