'No one else? Only your brother?' in great surprise. 'I don't know when I have seen such accuracy even in the school of art.'

'Edgar is so particular about that.'

'Well, if I could only get him to learn his own lesson!'

'I have so little to copy,' said Cherry. 'I have nothing to distract me.'

It was little enough; a few second-hand studies of his; a cast that Felix had given her off an Italian boy's board, which came opportunely on her birthday; and her living models when she could catch them, generally surreptitiously. But upon her small materials she had worked perseveringly, going back to the same subject whenever she gained a new light, profiting by every hint, till the result was an evident amazement to the artist; and as he emphatically said, pointing to an outline caught from John Harewood as he was reading last summer, 'This is not talent, it is genius! You ought to give yourself advantages, Miss Underwood.'

Cherry smiled rather sadly. 'It is quite enough that Edgar should have them,' she said.

'Ah! if he would only take half the pains with his drawing that he seems to have inculcated upon you!'

It was a disappointment. She had much rather have heard Edgar's genius praised than her own, which, be it what it might, she had come to believe must, for want of cultivation, be limited to the supply of Christmas cards and unsatisfactory illuminations.

But when the sisters had gone to bed, Mr. Renville had much more to say. He had sought Felix out a good deal for the purpose of talking over Edgar, He said that the young man's talent was of a graceful, fantastic, ingenious description, such as with application would be available for prosperity if not for eminence; but application Edgar had never perseveringly given, since he had first found himself surpassed in the higher efforts of art. His powers were too versatile for his own good, and he dabbled in everything that was not his proper occupation—concerts, amateur theatricals, periodical literature and journalism, comic sketches. His doings were not all wholly unremunerative; but though he viewed them as mines of wealth, they were really lures into a shifty uncertain life, and distractions from steady consistent labour. His fine voice, his brilliant wit, and engaging manner, made him a star in the lively society on the outskirts of art; and he was expensive, careless, and irregular in his hours to a degree that sorely tried the good man, a precisian in his domestic customs. He and his little German wife, however, loved the lad, as everybody did love him who came under the influence of his sunshiny grace and sweetness of temper—the unselfish manner inherited from one whose unselfishness was real; and used as they were to the freedom of artist life, their allowances were liberal; but of late there had been a recklessness and want of purpose about his ways which both grieved and alarmed them: he was more unsettled than ever, seemed to have lost all interest in his studies at the Academy, was getting into a set that had degenerated from permissible eccentricity into something very like lawlessness, and even while an undesirable inmate, had vexed his kind friend and master by proposing to remove from under his roof, and set up with a chosen comrade of his own.

Committed to his charge, as Edgar Underwood had been by the elder brother, the kind little artist felt it his duty not to let him go without an intimation to his family, though well aware that a father could have little control in such a case, how much less a brother only by two years the elder?