As if reading her thoughts, the young man said: “If I don’t carry my brushes in this way I may forget to wash them; I sometimes do and then don’t I have a time to get them clean? By the way, Elfie, I have not properly introduced myself.” He picked up a shining brown leaf from the ground, selected a brush which still held some red paint, and with it wrote on the leaf which he handed gravely to Elizabeth.
She took it gingerly so as not to rub off the paint. What a delightful man he was, to be sure, and how unlike any other person she had met. She looked earnestly at what he had written. It was: “Oliver Kemp, a reincarnation of Titian.” Elizabeth had not the slightest idea what reincarnation meant, and she looked up questioningly to see laughter in the young man’s eyes, so she knew it was a sort of joke, but she determined to keep the leaf as a treasure. She held it very carefully by the stem, carrying her pussywillows in the other hand. “You don’t know my name,” she said presently.
“Oh, yes, I do: it is Elfie.”
“You have the first two letters right,” said Elizabeth gayly.
“That is quite enough; I needn’t try for any more. It is a great satisfaction to get things partly right: I don’t always do it, I know,” he added, partly to himself.
They had reached the long street by this time and Mr. Kemp stood still and looked up and down, toward the church spire, the white, brown or red houses, the rows of trees each side the street in one direction and, in the other, hills, forests and winding road. “Do you know, Elfie,” he said, “I like this village of yours and I should like to stay here for awhile. Do you know of any place like a chicken-coop or a wood-house or any little cubby where I could keep my stool and easel and where I could paint when it was too cold or too stormy to go out?”
“A chicken-coop wouldn’t be big enough,” returned Elizabeth in all gravity, “but maybe a hen-house would do. I don’t exactly think of any just now, but maybe I could hear of something.”
“That’s a good child; I wish you would. I will come up tomorrow and find out. You live,—let me see, where is it you live?”
“In that brown house off there at the end of the street,”—Elizabeth pointed it out to him.
“Of course; I might have known it would be brown, like a tree. I suppose you go in there only when it is very cold or stormy and stay in the woods the rest of the time; elves always do, you know.”