"And that's the best of it," interrupted Joyce. "He asked to be allowed to do it for nothing. Time hangs so heavily on his hands that he said it would be a charity to give him something to do, and Mr. Ellestad told me afterward, as we walked home, that I ought to let him, because it's the first thing that he has taken any interest in for months; that with something to occupy his mind and make him contented, he would get better much faster.
"When I tried to thank him, and told him that he had showed me a better way to the City of my Desire than the one I had planned for myself, he said, with the brightest kind of a smile, 'I expect to get far more out of this arrangement than you, my little girl. _You_ are the alchemist whose courage and hope shall help me distil some drop of Contentment out of this dreary existence.'
"He is going to drive up here to-morrow, to ask you about it, and to see the work I have already done. I'm glad now that I saved all those charcoal sketches of block hands and ears and things. And I'm going to get out all those still life studies I did with Miss Brown, and pin them up on the wall, so he'll know just how far I've gone, and where to start in with me."
"Get them out now," said Lloyd. "You never did show them to me."
There was some very creditable work hidden away in the old portfolio, and, while they talked and looked and arranged the studies on the wall, time slipped by unnoticed.
"Aren't you mighty proud, Aunt Emily?" asked Lloyd, stepping back for a final view, when the exhibit was duly arranged.
"Proud and glad," answered Mrs. Ware, with a happy light in her eyes. "It was always my dream to be an artist myself, and now to see my unfulfilled ambitions realized in Joyce more than compensates for all my disappointments."
"Phil's coming," called Norman, from the yard.
"And we haven't started for the bees!" exclaimed Joyce. "It's so late, we'll have to put it off until to-morrow."
But all plans for the morrow were laid aside when Phil told his errand. He would not dismount, but paused just a moment to invite them to the promised picnic at Hole-in-the-rock.
"Everybody on the ranch is going," he explained. "Even Jo, to make the coffee and unpack the lunch. There'll be a carriage here for you, Aunt Emily, at three o'clock, and you must let Mary and Holland stay home from school to go. No, don't bother to take any picnic baskets," he interrupted, hastily, as Mrs. Ware started to say something about lunch. "This is my affair. Jo is equal to anything, even cherry tarts and custard pies, and I must make the atonement I promised to Lloyd, for spilling hers."