Fifty yards to the rear of the dwelling-house the studio half hid itself amongst young elms and laurel bushes, at its outside rather like a granary, internally like a chapel, the timbers of the roof exposed and umber-stained, with a sort of clerestory for the top light, a few casts of life-size statues in the corners, and two or three large bas-reliefs of Madonnas and the like by Donatello helping out the ecclesiastical illusion. It was the last place to associate with the sound of drums, and yet I sat for twenty minutes sometimes stunned, sometimes fascinated, by the uproar of asses’ skin. The sculptor who played might, by one less unconventional, be looked upon as seriously sacrificing his dignity in a performance so incongruous with his age and situation. But I have always loved the whimsical; I am myself considered somewhat eccentric, and there is a rapport between artistic souls that permits—indeed, induces—some display of fantasy or folly when they get into each other’s society apart from the intolerant folks who would think it lunacy for a man of over middle age to indulge in the contre-dance of “Petronella” at a harvest-home, or display any accomplishment with the jew’s-harp.

Urquhart, at the time when I sat to him, was a man of sixty years or thereabout; yet he marched up and down the floor of his workshop with the step of a hill-bred lad, his whole body sharing the rhythm of his beating, his clean-shaven face with the flush of a winter apple, the more noticeable in contrast with the linen smock he used as an overall while at work among his clay. The deep old-fashioned side-drum swinging at his groin seemed to have none of a drum’s monotony. It expressed (at all events to me that have some fancy) innumerable ecstasies and emotions—alarms, entreaties, defiances, gaieties, and regrets, the dreadful sentiment of forlorn hopes, the murmur of dubious battalions in countries of ambush. The sound of the drum is, unhappily, beyond typographical expression, though long custom makes us complacently accept “rat-a-tat-tat” or “rub-a-dub-dub” as quite explanatory of its every phrase and accent; but I declare the sculptor brought from it the very pang of love. Alternated with the martial uproar of rouses, retreats, chamades, and marches that made the studio shake, it rose into the clerestory and lingered in the shades of the umber roof, this gentle combination of taps and roulades, like the appeal of one melodiously seeking admission at his mistress’s door.

“You had no idea that I handled sticks so terrifically?” said he, relinquishing the instrument at last, and returning to his proper task of recording my lineaments in the preparatory clay.

“You play marvellously, Mr Urquhart,” I said, astonished. “I had no idea you added the drum to your—to your accomplishments.”

“Well, there you have me revealed—something of a compliment to you, I assure you, for I do not beat my drum for everybody. If I play well it is, after all, no wonder, for with a side-drum and a pair of sticks I earned a living for seven years and travelled among the most notable scenes of Europe.”

“So?” I said, and waited. He pinched the clay carefully to make the presentment of the lobe of my ear, and stood back from his work a moment to study the effect.

“Yes,” he said, “few people know of it; and perhaps it is as well, for it might not be counted wholly to the credit of an R.S.A. if it were known; but for seven years I played the side-drum in the ranks of the 71st. I played from Torres Vedras to the Pyrenees, at Vimiera, Corunna, Talavera, Busaco, Ciudad Rodrigo, Badajos, Quatre Bras, and Waterloo. Lord! the very names go dirling through my heart. They were happy days, I assure you, when I—when I—”

“Thumped the skin,” I ventured foolishly, as he paused to make a line of some importance on my effigy.

He corrected me with a vexed air.

“Thumped, my dear sir, is scarcely the word I should use under the circumstances. That hackneyed verb of every dolt who has neither ear nor imagination should not be chosen by a fellow-artist, a man of letters, to describe the roll of the drum. My happiest days, as I was about to say, were when I carried Kildalton’s silver drum, for which this one is but an indifferent substitute.”

“Well, at least,” said I lamely, “the drummer of the 71st has gone pretty far in another art than music.”

“It is very good of you to say so,” remarked Urquhart, with quiet dignity and an old-fashioned bow. “I trust, by-and-by, with assiduity to become as good a sculptor as I was a drummer.”

“How did you happen to join the Army?” I asked, anxious to have him follow up so promising an introduction.

“Because I was a fool. Mind, I do not regret it, for I had at the same time, in my folly, such memorable and happy experiences as quite improperly (as you might think) never come to the doorstep of the very wise. Still, I joined the Army in a fool’s escapade, resenting what seemed to me the insufferable restrictions of a Scottish manse. My father was incumbent of a parish, half Highland, half Lowland. At sixteen I came home from Edinburgh and my first session of the University there; at sixteen and a half I mutinied against sixpence a week of pocket-money and the prospect of the Divinity Hall for one (as I felt) designed by Heaven for Art, and with a borrowed name and an excellently devised tale of orphanhood, took a bounty in the territorial regiment. They put me to the drums. They professed to find me so well suited there that they kept me at them all the time I was a King’s man, in spite of all my protests, and there, if you are in the mood for a story, I had an experience.

“The corps had two drums of silver, one of which was entrusted to me. They were called ‘Kildalton’s drums,’ in compliment to their donor, from whose lands no fewer than four companies of the 71st had been embodied. They were handsome instruments, used only for stately occasions, and mine, at least, so much engaged my fancy that I liked to keep it shining like a mirror; and the cords and tassels of silk—pleated, as we were told, by Kildalton’s daughter—appealed so much to the dandiacal in me, I fretted to have them wet on a parade. You can fancy, therefore, my distress when my darling was subjected to the rough work and hazards of the sack of Ciudad Rodrigo.

“Our corps on that occasion was in the Light Division. While Picton’s men, away to our left and nearer the river, were to attack the great breach made in the ramparts by our guns on the Tessons, we were to rush into a lesser breach farther east. The night was black and cold to that degree I could not see the fortress at a hundred yards, and could scarcely close my fingers on the drum-sticks as I beat for the advance of Napier’s storming party. The walls we threatened burst in tongues of flame and peals of thunder. Grape-shot tore through our three hundred as we crossed the ditch; but in a moment we were in the gap, the bayonets busy as it were among wine-skins, the footing slimy with blood, and a single drum (my comrade fell mortally wounded in the ditch) beat inside the walls for the column outside to follow us.”

“Yes, yes,” I said, impatient, for Urquhart drew back abstracted, checking his tale to survey the effect of his last touch upon my eyebrows.

He smiled.

“Why,” said he, “I hardly thought it would interest you,” and then went on deliberately.

“I need not tell you,” he said, “how quick was our conquering of the French, once we had got through the walls. My drum was not done echoing back from Sierra de Francisca (as I think the name was), when the place was ours. And then—and then—there came the sack! Our men went mad. These were days when rapine and outrage were to be expected from all victorious troops; there might be some excuse for hatred of the Spaniard on the part of our men, whose comrades, wounded, had been left to starve at Talavera—but surely not for this. They gorged with wine, they swarmed in lawless squads through every street and alley; swept through every dwelling, robbing and burning; the night in a while was white with fires, and the town was horrible with shrieks and random musket-shots and drunken songs.

“Some time in the small hours of the morning, trying to find my own regiment, I came with my drum to the head of what was doubtless the most dreadful street that night in Europe. It was a lane rather than a street, unusually narrow, with dwellings on either side so high that it had some semblance to a mountain pass. At that hour, if you will credit me, it seemed the very gullet of the Pit: the far end of it in flames, the middle of it held by pillagers who fought each other for the plunder from the houses, while from it came the most astounding noises—oaths in English and Portuguese, threats, entreaties, and commands, the shrieks of women, the crackling of burning timber, occasionally the firing of weapons, and through it all, constant, sad beyond expression, a deep low murmur, intensely melancholy, made up of the wail of the sacked city.

“As I stood listening some one called out, ‘Drummer!’

“I turned, to find there had just come up a general officer and his staff, with a picket of ten men. The General himself stepped forward at my salute and put his hand on my drum, that shone brightly in the light of the conflagrations.

“‘What the deuce do you mean, sir,’ said he with heat, ‘by coming into action with my brother’s drum? You know very well it is not for these occasions.’

“‘The ordinary drums of the regiment were lost on Monday last, sir,’ I said, ‘when we were fording the Agueda through the broken ice.’ And then, with a happy thought, I added, ‘Kildalton’s drums are none the worse for taking part in the siege of Ciudad Rodrigo. This was the first drum through the walls.’

“He looked shrewdly at me and gave a little smile. ‘H’m,’ he muttered, ‘perhaps not, perhaps not, after all. My brother would have been pleased, if he had been alive, to know his drums were here this night. Where is the other one?’

“‘The last I saw of it, sir,’ I answered, ‘was in the ditch, and Colin Archibald, corporal, lying on his stomach over it.’

“‘Dead?’

“‘Dead, I think, sir.’

“‘H’m!’ said the General. ‘I hope my brother’s drum’s all right, at any rate.’ He turned and cried up the picket. ‘I want you, drummer,’ he said, ‘to go up that lane with this picket, playing the assembly. You understand? These devils fighting and firing there have already shot at three of my officers, and are seemingly out of their wits. We will give them a last chance. I don’t deny there is danger in what I ask you to do, but it has to be done. The men in there are mostly of Pack’s Portuguese and the dregs of our own corps. If they do not come out with you I shall send in a whole regiment to them and batter their brains out against the other end, if the place is, as I fancy, a cul-de-sac. March!’

“I went before the picket with my drum rattling and my heart in my mouth. The pillagers came round us jeering, others assailed us more seriously by throwing from upper windows anything they could conveniently lay hand on (assuming it was too large or too valueless to pocket), but we were little the worse till in a lamentable moment of passion one of the picket fired his musket at a window. A score of pieces flashed back in response, and five of our company fell, while we went at a double for the end of the lane.

“‘By Heaven!’ cried the sergeant when we reached it, ‘here’s a fine thing!’ The General had been right—it was a cul-de-sac! There was nothing for us then but to return.

“You have never been in action; you cannot imagine,” Urquhart went on, “the exasperating influence of one coward in a squad that is facing great danger. There were now, you must know, but six of us, hot and reckless with anger, and prepared for anything—all but one, and he was in the fear of death. As I went before the picket drumming the assembly and the sergeant now beside me, this fellow continually kicked my heels, he kept so close behind. I turned my head, and found that he marched crouching, obviously eager to have a better man than himself sheltering him from any approaching bullet.

“‘You cowardly dog!’ I cried, stepping aside, ‘come out from behind me and die like a man!’ I could take my oath the wretch was sobbing! It made me sick to hear him, but I was saved more thought of it by the rush of some women across the lane, shrieking as they ran, with half a company at least of Portuguese at their heels. With a shout we were after Pack’s scoundrels, up a wide pend close (as we say in Scotland) that led into a courtyard, where we found the valorosas prepared to defend the position with pistol and sword. A whole battalion would have hesitated to attack such odds, and I will confess we swithered for a moment. A shot came from the dark end of the entry and tore through both ends of my drum.

“‘We’re wretched fools to be here at all,’ said lily-liver, plainly whimpering, and at that I threw down my outraged instrument, snatched his musket from him, and charged up the close with the other four. The Portuguese ran like rabbits; for the time, at least, the women were safe, and I had a remorse for my beloved drum.

“I left the others to follow, hurried into the lane, and found the poltroon was gone, my drum apparently with him. Ciudad Rodrigo was darker now, for the fires were burning low. It was less noisy, too; and I heard half-way up the lane the sound of a single musket-shot. I ran between the tall tenements; the glint of bright metal filled me with hope and apprehension. A man lay in the gutter beside my drum, and a Portuguese marauder, who fled at my approach, stood over him with a knife.

“The man in the gutter was the General, with his brother’s drum slung to him, and the sticks in his hands, as if he had been playing. He was unconscious, with a bullet through his shoulder.”

II.

Urquhart stopped his tale again, to wheel round the platform on which I sat, so as to get me more in profile.

“This looks marvellously like stuff for a story,” I said to him as he set to work again upon the clay. “My professional interests are fully aroused. Please go on.”

He smiled again.

“I am charmed to find you can be so easily entertained,” said he. “After all, what is it? Merely a trifling incident. Every other man who went through the Peninsular campaign came on experiences, I am sure, far more curious. My little story would have ended in the lane of Ciudad Rodrigo had not three companies of the 71st—mainly invalids after Badajos—been sent to Scotland for a whiff of their native air, and the fascination of recruits. I had got a spent ball in the chest at Badajos. I, too, had that gay vacation. I went with my silver drum to the county it came from. It was glorious summer weather. For three weeks we were billeted in the county town; for a fortnight I would not have changed places with King George himself.”

“Mr Urquhart,” I said, “I have a premonition. Here comes in the essential lady.”

The sculptor smiled.

“Here, indeed,” he said, “comes in the lady. There are, I find, no surprises for a novelist. We were one day (to resume my story) in the burgh square, where a market was being held, and hopes were entertained by our captain that a few landward lads might nibble at the shilling. Over one side of the square towered a tall whitewashed house of many windows; and as I, with a uniform tunic that was the pride of the regimental tailor, five feet eleven, twenty-one years of age, and the vanity of a veteran, played my best to half a dozen fifes, I noticed the lady at a window—the only window in all that massive house-front to manifest any interest in our presence or performance. I turned my silver drum a little round upon my leg that it might reflect more dazzlingly the light of the afternoon sun, and threw into my beats and rolls the most graceful style that was at my command, all the while with an eye on madam. It was my youthful conceit that I had caught her fancy when, a little later—our sergeants busy among the rustics—she came out from the house and over where I sat apart beside my drum on the steps of the market cross. She was younger than myself, a figure so airy and graceful, you would swear that if she liked she could dance upon blue-bells without bruising a petal; she had hair the colour of winter bracken in sunshine, and the merriest smile.“‘Excuse me,’ said she, ‘but I must look at the darling drum—the sweet drum,’ and caught the silken cords in her fingers, and ran a palm of the daintiest hand I had ever seen over the shining barrel.

“I thought she might, with more creditable human sentiment, have had less interest in my drum and more in me, but displayed my instrument with the best grace I could command.

“‘Do you know why I am so interested?’ she asked in a little, looking at me out of deep brown eyes in which I saw two little red-coated drummers, a thing which gave me back my vanity and made me answer her only with a smile. Her cheek for the first time reddened, and she hurried to explain. ‘They are Kildalton’s drums. Mr Fraser of Kildalton was my father, who is dead, and my mother is dead too; and I pleated and tied these cords and tassels first. How beautifully you keep them!’

“‘Well, Miss Fraser,’ said I, ‘I assure you I could not keep them better if I tried; but, after this, I shall have a better reason than ever for keeping them at their best,’ a soldier’s speech she smiled at as she turned away. As she went into the tall white house again she paused on the threshold and looked back for a moment at me, smiling, and for the first time since I took the bounty I rued my bargain, and thought I was meant for something more dignified than drumming. From that hour I lived in the eyes of Kildalton’s daughter Margory. Once a week we went fifing and drumming through the square. She was on these occasions never absent from her window; there was never a smile awanting for the smart young gentleman who beat the silver drum. A second and a third time she came into the square to speak to me. I made the most of my opportunities, and she was speedily made to discover in the humble drummer a fellow of race and education, a fellow with a touch of poetry, if you please. She was an orphan, as I have indicated—the ward of an uncle, a general, at the time abroad. She lived on the surviving fortune of Kildalton, in the tall white house, with an elderly aunt and a servant. At our third interview—we have a way of being urgent in the Army—she had trysted to meet me that evening in the wood behind the town.

“Let me do the girl justice, and say that the drum of Kildalton brought her there, and not the drummer. At least, she was at pains to tell me so, for I had mentioned to her, with some of the gift of poetry I have mentioned, how infinitely varied were the possibilities of an instrument she would never have a proper chance to judge of in the routine of a fife-and-drum parade.

“My billet was at the back of the town, on the verge of a wood, with the window of my room opening on a sort of hunting-path that went winding through the heart of what I have called a wood, but was in actual fact a forest of considerable dimensions. I went out by the window that evening with my drum, and walked, as had been arranged, about a mile among the trees till I came to a narrow glen that cleft the hills, a burn of shallow water from the peaty uplands bickering at the bottom of it. A half moon swung like a halbert over the heights that were edged by enormous fir-trees, and the wood was melancholy with the continuous call of owls. They were soon silenced, for I began to play the silver drum.

“I began with the reveille, though it was a properer hour for the tattoo, playing it lightly, so that while it silenced the hooting owls it did not affright the whole forest. She came through the trees timidly, clothed, as I remember, in a gown of green. She might have been the spirit of the pine-plantings; she might have been a dryad charmed from the swinging boughs. ‘Margory! Margory!’ I cried, my heart more noisy than my drum had been, and clasped her to my arms. ‘Here’s a poor drummer, my dear,’ I said, ‘and you a queen. If you do not love me you were less cruel to take this dirk and stab me to the heart than act the heartless coquette.’

“She faintly struggled. He hair fell loose in a lock or two from under her hat, surged on her shoulder, and billowed about my lips. Her cheek was warm; her eyes threw back the challenge of the silver moon over the tops of pine.

“‘For a young gentleman from a kirk manse, Master Drummer, you have considerable impertinence,’ said she, panting in my arms.

“‘My name, dear Margory, is George, as I have told you,’ I whispered, and I kissed her.

“‘George, dear George,’ said she, ‘have done with folly! Let me hear the drumming and go home.’

“I swung her father’s drum again before me and gave, in cataracts of sound, or murmuring cascades, the sentiments of my heart.

“‘Wonderful! Oh, wonderful!’ she cried, entranced; so I played on.

“The moon went into a cloud; the glade of a sudden darkened; I ceased my playing, swung the drum again behind, and turned for Margory.

“She was gone!

“I cried her name as I ran through the forest, but truly she was gone.”

Urquhart stopped his story and eagerly dashed some lines upon the clay. “Pardon!” he said. “Just like that, for a moment. Ah! that is something like it!”

“Well, well!” I cried. “And what followed?”

“I think—indeed, I know—she loved me, but—I went back to the war without a single word from her again.”

“Oh, to the deuce with your story!” I cried at that, impatient. “I did not bargain for a tragedy.”“In truth it is something of a farce, as you shall discover in a moment,” said the sculptor. “Next day the captain sent for me. ‘Do you know General Fraser?’ said he, looking at a letter he held in his hand. I told him I had not the honour. ‘Well,’ said he, ‘it looks as if the family had a curious penchant for the drum, to judge from the fact that his brother gave yours to the regiment, and also’—here he smiled slyly—’from the interest of his niece. He is not an hour returned from Spain to his native town when he asks me to send you with your drum to his house at noon.’

“‘Very good, sir,’ I answered, with my heart thundering, and went out of the room most hugely puzzled.

“I went at noon to the tall white house, and was shown into a room where sat Margory, white to the lips, beside the window, out of which she looked after a single hopeless glance at me. A middle-aged gentleman in mufti, with an empty sleeve, stood beside her, and closely scrutinised myself and my instrument as I entered.

“‘This is the—the person you have referred to?’ he asked her, and she answered with a sob and an inclination of her head.

“‘You have come—you are reputed to have come of a respectable family,’ he said then, addressing me; ‘you have studied at Edinburgh; you have, I am told, some pretensions to being something of a gentleman.’

“‘I hope they are no pretensions, sir,’ I answered warmly. ‘My people are as well known and as reputable as any in Argyll, though I should be foolishly beating a drum.’

“‘Very good,’ said he, in no way losing his composure. ‘I can depend on getting the truth from you, I suppose? You were with the 71st as drummer at Ciudad Rodrigo?’

“‘I was, sir,’ I replied. ‘Also at Badajos, at Talavera, Busaco—’

“‘An excellent record!’ he interrupted. ‘I might have learned all about it later had not my wound kept me two months in hospital after Ciudad. By the way, you remember being sent as drummer with a picket of men down a lane?’

“I started, gave a careful look at him, and recognised the General whose life I had doubtless saved from the pillaging Portuguese.

“‘I do, sir,’ I answered. ‘It was you yourself who sent me.’

“He turned with a little air of triumph to Margory. ‘I told you so, my dear,’ said he. ‘I got but a distant glimpse of him this forenoon, and thought I could not be mistaken.’ And Margory sobbed.

“‘My lad,’ he said, visibly restraining some emotion, ‘I could ask your drum-major to take the cords of Kildalton my brother’s drum and whip you out of a gallant corps. I sent you with a picket—a brave lad, as I thought any fellow should be who played Kildalton’s drum, and you came back a snivelling poltroon. Nay—nay!’ he cried, lifting up his hand and checking my attempt at an explanation. ‘You came out of that infernal lane whimpering like a child, after basely deserting your comrades of the picket, and made the mutilated condition of your drum the excuse for refusing my order to go back again, and I, like a fool, lost a limb in showing you how to do your duty.’

“‘But, General—’ I cried out.

“‘Be off with you!’ he cried. ‘Another word, and I shall have you thrashed at the triangle.’

“He fairly thrust me from the room, and the last I heard was Margory’s sobbing.

“Next day I was packed off to the regimental depot, and some weeks later played a common drum at Salamanca.”

The sculptor rubbed the clay from his hands and took off his overall.

“That will do to-day, I think,” said he. “I am much better pleased than I was yesterday,” and he looked at his work with satisfaction.

“But the story, my dear Mr Urquhart. You positively must give me its conclusion!” I demanded.

“Why in the world should that not be its conclusion?” said he, drawing a wet sheet over the bust. “Would you insist on the hackneyed happy ending?”

“I am certain you did not take your quittance from the General in that way. You surely wrote to Margory or to him with an explanation?”

The sculptor smiled.

“Wrote!” cried he. “Do you think that so obvious an idea would not occur to me? But reflect again, I pray you, on the circumstances,—an obscure and degraded drummer—the daughter of one of the oldest families in the Highlands—the damning circumstantiality of her uncle’s evidence of my alleged poltroonery. My explanation was too incredible for pen and paper; and the poltroon himself, the man who had brought the disgrace upon me, was beyond my identification, even had I known where to look for him.”

“And yet, Mr Urquhart,” I insisted, all my instincts as romancer assuring me of some other conclusion to a tale that had opened on a note so cheerful, “I feel sure it was neither a tragedy nor a farce in the long-run.”

“Well, you are right,” he confessed, smiling. “It was my drum that lost me the lady before ever I met her, as it were, and it was but fair that my drum should be the means of my recovering her ten years later. A reshuffling of the cards of fortune in my family brought me into a position where I was free to adopt the career of Art, and by-and-by I had a studio of my own in Edinburgh. It was the day of the portrait bust in marble. To have one’s own effigy in white, paid for by one’s own self, in one’s own hall, was, in a way, the fad of fashionable Edinburgh. It was profitable for the artist, I admit, but—but—”

“But it palled,” I suggested.

“Beyond belief! I grew to hate the appearance of every fresh client, and it was then that I sought the solace of this drum. When a sitter had gone for the day I drummed the vexation out of me, feeling that without some such relief I could never recover a respect for myself. And by-and-by I began to discover in the instrument something more than a relief for my feelings of revolt against the commercial demands on my art. I found in it an inspiration to rare emotions: I found in it memory. I found, in the reveilles and chamades that I played in fields of war and in the forest to my Marjory, love revived and mingled with a sweet regret, and from these—memory, regret, and love—I fashioned what have been my most successful sculptures.

“One day a gentleman came with a commission for his own portrait. It was General Fraser! Of course, he did not recognise me. Was it likely he should guess that the popular sculptor and the lad he had sent in disgrace from the tall white house in the distant Highland burgh town were one? Nor did I at first reveal myself. Perhaps, indeed, he would never have discovered my identity had not his eyes fallen on my drum.

“‘You have had a military subject lately?’ he said, indicating the instrument.

“‘No, General,’ I answered on an impulse. ‘That is a relic of some years of youthful folly when I played Kildalton’s silver drum, and it serves to solace my bachelor solitude.’

“‘Heavens!’ he cried; ‘you, then, are the drummer of Ciudad Rodrigo?’

“‘The same,’ I answered, not without a bitterness. ‘But a very different man from the one you imagine.’ And then I told my story. He listened in a curious mingling of apparent shame, regret, and pleasure, and when I had ended was almost piteous in his plea for pardon. ‘The cursed thing is,’ he said, that Margory maintains your innocence till this very day.’

“That she should have that confidence in me,’ said I, ‘is something of a compensation for the past ten years. I trust Miss Margory—I trust your niece is well.’

“The General pondered for a moment, then made a proposition.

“‘I think, Mr Urquhart,’ said he, ‘that a half-winged old man is but a poor subject for any sculptor’s chisel, and, with your kind permission, I should prefer to have a portrait of Miss Margory, whom I can swear you will find quite worthy of your genius.’

“And so,” said Urquhart in conclusion, “and so, indeed, she was.”

“There is but one dÉnouement possible,” I said with profound conviction, and, as I said it, a bar of song rose in the garden, serene and clear and unexpected like the first morning carol of a bird in birchen shaws. Then the door of the studio flung open, and the singer entered, with the melody checked on her lips whenever she saw the unexpected stranger. She had hair the colour of winter bracken in sunshine, and the merriest smile.

“My daughter Margory,” said the sculptor. “Tell your mother,” he added, “that I bring our friend to luncheon.”