But labouring secretly and without encouragement, Olive found her progress in drawing—she did not venture to call these humble efforts Art—very slow indeed. One day, when Mrs. Rothesay was gone out, Meliora came in to have a chat with her young favourite, and found poor Olive sitting by herself, quietly crying. There was lying beside her an unfinished sketch, which she hastily hid, before Miss Vanbrugh could notice what had been her occupation.
“My dear, what is the matter with you—no serious trouble, I hope?” cried the painter's little sister, who always melted into anxious compassion at the sight of anybody's tears. But Olive's only flowed the faster—she being in truth extremely miserable. For this day her mother had sorrowfully alluded to Mr. Gwynne's claim, and had begun to propose many little personal sacrifices on her own part, which grieved her affectionate daughter to the heart.
Meliora made vain efforts at comforting, and then, as a last resource, she went and fetched two little kittens and laid them on Olive's lap by way of consolation; for her own delight and solace was in her household menagerie, from which she was ever evolving great future blessings. She had always either a cat so beautiful, that when sent to Edwin Landseer, it would certainly produce a revolution in the subjects of his animal-pictures—or else a terrier so bewitching, that she intended to present it to her then girlish, dog-loving Majesty, thereby causing a shower of prosperity to fall upon the household of Vanbrugh.
Olive dried her tears, and stroked the kittens—her propensity for such pets was not her lightest merit in Meliora's eyes. Then she suffered herself to be tenderly soothed into acknowledging that she was very unhappy.
“I'll not ask you why, my dear, because Michael used to tell me I had far too much of feminine curiosity. I only meant, could I comfort you in any way?”
There was something so unobtrusive in her sympathy, that Olive felt inclined to open her heart to the gentle Meliora. “I can't tell you all,” said she, “I think it would be not quite right;” and, trembling and hesitating, as if even the confession indicated something of shame, she whispered her longing for that great comfort, money of her own earning.
“You, my dear, you want money!” cried Miss Meliora, who had always looked upon her new inmate, Mrs. Rothesay, as a sort of domestic gold-mine. But she had the delicacy not to press Olive further.
“I do. I can't tell you why, but it is for a good—a holy purpose—Oh, Miss Vanbrugh, if you could but show me any way of earning money for myself! Think for me—you, who know so much more of the world than I.”
—Which truth did not at all disprove the fact, that innocent little Meliora was a very child in worldly wisdom. She proved it by her next sentence, delivered oracularly after some minutes of hard cogitation. “My dear, there is but one way to gain wealth and prosperity. If you had but a taste for Art!”
Olive looked up eagerly. “Ah, that is what I have been brooding over this long time; until I was ashamed of myself and my own presumption.”