At last the light began to fade, and Madge knew that she must stop.
"What do you suppose Father said to me this morning?" she asked, as she washed out her brushes and put her paint-box in order.
"Well, he said that when any good judge thought my pictures worth paying for in good hard cash, it would be time to think of sending me 'traipsing over the world with my paint-pot.' He said that if I would come to him with a fifty-dollar bill of my own earning he should begin to think there was some sense in my art-talk."
"Did he really say that? Why, Madge, who knows?"
Madge had shut up her paint-box and moved to the window, where she was gloomily looking down into her neighbours' backyards.
"If you mean Noah's Dove," she said, "You might as well give him up. He's come back for the thirteenth time."
Now "Noah's Dove" was the name which Madge had bestowed upon a small bundle of pen-and-ink sketches which she had been sending about to the illustrated papers for two or three months past, and which had earned their name by the persistency with which they had found their way back again. The girls had both thought them funny and original; indeed Eleanor, with the partiality of one's best friend, did not hesitate to pronounce them better than many of the things that got accepted. Up to this time, however, no editor had seemed disposed to recognise their merits, and they had been repeatedly and ignominiously rejected.
"But you'll keep on sending them, won't you, Madge?" Eleanor insisted.
"Of course I shall, as long as there is a picture-paper left in the country; though the postage does cost an awful lot!"
The sun had set, and a tinge of rosy colour was spreading across the northern sky behind the chimneys. The girls stood silent for a moment, watching the colour deepen, while a wistful look came into Eleanor's face.
"After all, Madge," she said; "it must be nice to have somebody think for you, even when he doesn't think the way you want him to."
"Oh, of course, Father's a dear. I don't suppose I would swap him off, even for Paris!"
"I wish I could even remember my father or my mother, or anybody that really belonged to me!" Eleanor said; then, feeling that she was making an appeal for sympathy, a thing which she was principled against doing, she turned her eyes away from the tender, beguiling colour behind the chimneys, and looked, instead, at the big oil portrait on the wall. "It's something to have even a painted grandfather of your own!" she declared.