"I am become like a pelican in the wilderness, Olaf," the owner of these
vanities complained. "Are you very busy? Cousin Agatha is about her
housekeeping, and I have read the afternoon paper all through,--even the
list of undelivered letters and the woman's page,--and I just want to
see the Gilbert Stuart picture," she concluded,--exercising, one is
afraid, a certain economy in regard to the truth.

This was a little too much. If a man's working-hours are not to be
respected--if his privacy is to be thus invaded on the flimsiest of
pretexts,--why, then, one may very reasonably look for chaos to come
again. This, Rudolph Musgrave decided, was a case demanding firm and
instant action. Here was a young person who needed taking down a peg or
two, and that at once.

But he made the mistake of looking at her first. And after that, he lied
glibly. "Good Lord, no! I am not in the least busy now. In fact, I was
just about to look you two up."

"I was rather afraid of disturbing you." She hesitated; and a lucent
mischief woke in her eyes. "You are so patriarchal, Olaf," she lamented.
"I felt like a lion venturing into a den of Daniels. But if you cross
your heart you aren't really busy--why, then, you can show me the
Stuart, Olaf."

It is widely conceded that Gilbert Stuart never in his after work
surpassed the painting which hung then in Rudolph Musgrave's study,--the
portrait of the young Gerald Musgrave, afterward the friend of Jefferson
and Henry, and, still later, the author of divers bulky tomes,
pertaining for the most part to ethnology. The boy smiles at you from