The first smile she had ever seen on the boy's face altered it now as he looked at her, and her heart beat faster in a mystified sense that some cruelly bolted door had been pushed ajar.
"You can have that portfolio for your own, Bertie," she said.
"No, no, he'd kill me."
"What can you mean, dear child?"
The boy started up from his cushion and perched on top of the rock, glancing along the shore. Mrs. Lowell leaned forward and saw his hand with the pencil move swiftly here and there on the blank sheet. She said not a word, but watched the slender young face with the new alertness in the eyes.
The tide was making its splendid slow retreat, the gulls were wheeling and crying, and white as their wings the daisy drifts were beginning to appear on the uplands. Activity, growing, unfolding, all about her, the watcher felt this waif to be part of it. One of God's little ones who could not be kept in bondage.
At last the boy came down again and gave her his work. She looked at it in amazement. The curve of the shore, the groups of spruces, a distant cottage, the light clouds on the blue were all sketched in with a sure touch.
"Who taught you this, Bertie?"
"Nobody—but I watched my mother. She was an artist. She let me draw beside her. She knew I could. She said so. I'll show you. You won't tell?"