Upon the Virginia side of the Potomac River, five miles across from Washington City whose twinkling lights can be distinctly seen by night, lies a little farm of about twenty-five acres, owned by a widow and her three daughters, Caroline, Minnie and Rosa.

The dwelling is a villa rather than a farm-house, with wide verandas that are the favorite sitting-rooms of the family in summer. The glimpse they catch of the river traffic and of the far-off city gives them a cheerful feeling of nearness to active life, while they are removed from its noise and crowds.

Besides this property Widow Jones had found herself possessed, at her husband's death, of an immense tract of unproductive land down on Chesapeake Bay which could not be sold until

Rosa, the younger girl, now eighteen, came of age. Meanwhile, the taxes vexed her soul.

Hospitable, easy-going and accustomed to consider luxuries positive necessities, the family would have been severely straitened if it had not been for the nicety with which their various talents helped one another out.

Caroline had excellent business ability and managed all the outside affairs. She drew the dividends on their railway stock, parleyed with lawyers, and engaged and settled with the hired men. In the burning August weather, when a dozen red-shirted Negroes were to be cared for, this slender young girl, in flaring straw hat and short gingham dress, mounted her horse and rode up and down the fields, a keen-eyed, cheery, sweet-voiced overseer. Regardless of her own meals she helped old black Jessie prepare the meals for the men in the little cabin, and there was no complaint as to quality or quantity under her liberal rule. She did the marketing also and bought the other supplies. Then Mrs. Jones took up the work, and her deft fingers and good taste converted crude materials into food and raiment for the quartet. She was a notable housekeeper and the best of neighbors, her round, jolly visage being sure to appear at every moment of need, and her chicken broth and jellies lingered pleasantly in the memory of the fretful convalescent.

Minnie's function was the care of all the live animals on the farm. She had unerring judgment concerning mules and horses, understood the peculiarities of cows, and knew everything worth knowing about poultry and bees. She was a plump, happy-looking blonde, with a lovely hand, a neat foot, and a playfully witty tongue that, like her own bees, never stung the wise but kept fools at bay. Alert and busy from morning till night she gave no thought to the admirers who sighed for her smiles, but laughingly turned them over to Rosa, who had, she said, nothing else to do but to make herself charming.

Rosa was the strongest possible contrast to her energetic sisters. Rarely beautiful, and gifted with an artistic faculty that nearly approached genius, she was apparently utterly devoid of ambition or sense of responsibility, and was content to be waited upon and cared for as if she was still the petted infant whose graces had at the outset won the willing service of every one about her.

Her form was of medium height, but so symmetrical that she appeared taller than she was. Her head was borne on her full, white throat with a sort of dreamy grace, bent it almost seemed by the weight of her magnificent tresses, the color of ripe wheat when the sun is shining upon it, and falling a quarter of a yard below her waist. Her eyes were of a deep, dark brown, with the softness of a Newfoundland dog's when he is gazing wistfully at his master. It would have been as impossible to say anything harsh to Rosa, when she opened those great dark eyes and looked at you, as it would be to strike a dove or a gazelle or a sweet young baby. Usually the heavy, blue-veined lids half veiled them, and as her seashell cheeks warmed to their pinkest tone, and her exquisite bow of a mouth fell slightly apart, as she lay, as she loved to do, in the hammock on the west veranda, an artist would have thought her the very embodiment of love's young dream of sweet, maidenly beauty.

She seemed all softness and gentleness. Perhaps only her mother knew what strength of will and temper lay behind Rosa's placid brow and square little chin. There had been some stout tussels between a determined little mother and a rosebud of a baby in the years gone by; and although the match might have seemed an unequal one, the result had always been the same. "A compromise," Major Jones had laughingly called it, meaning, as he explained once in a candid moment, that the rosebud had its own way.

Rosa's way was only passively, not actively objectionable. All she asked was to be let alone; allowed to paint undisturbed in her untidy attic studio when the whim seized her, and to lie in the hammock like a kitten, dozing the hours away when she did not choose to exert herself. Occasionally she would have spells of helpfulness, and for several days her stool and box of colors would be set up beside the parlor or dining-room doorway, while she decorated the pannels with sprays of wistaria and masses of fern, so true to nature that one wondered where a little country girl had ever learned to paint after such a manner.

One warm afternoon in early September she was sitting on her stool in the hall, which ran through the middle of the house from end to end, putting slow, effective touches to a border above the dado which she had begun in the spring, and with characteristic indifference had left unfinished until now. Caroline, just in from a tour to the orchard, had thrown herself down upon the settee to rest, and was exchanging remarks with her mother about a certain dress trimming which the elder lady had under way when she suddenly broke off to exclaim:

"If there isn't Mr. Brent coming, and not a speck of meat in the house! Now, I suppose I shall have to go to town to market. I should think it was enough for him to be here every Sunday and Wednesday, without dropping upon us between whiles."

"Let Jessie kill a chicken," suggested Mrs. Jones, soothingly.

"But you know he doesn't eat chickens. If he was like any civilized American he would. But nothing except a round of raw beef satisfies his English appetite!"

But despite this small grumble, she smiled cordially as a good-looking, middle-aged man with a vigorous, florid face, set off by a pair of heavy black whiskers, came briskly up the path and included all of them in a general, informal bow.

"Do you like omelet?" she asked reflectively, as he took a seat near Rosa, and began commenting upon her work with an easy censorship which was evidently not disagreeable to her.

He gave a little shudder. "'I'll no pullet sperm in my brew,'" he quoted.

"Oh, I might have known you for a Falstaff," retorted Caroline, rising. "Well, Mamma, I'm off."

"Not on my account, Miss Caroline. See here, I've brought my animal diet with me, knowing that you ladies subsist on tea and fruit when I'm not about." And from his coat pocket he drew a roll of brown paper, three-quarters of a yard long, and held it out.

"Prime bologna," he added, complacently, as both mother and daughter laughed heartily, and Rosa turned to give one of her slow, sweet smiles.

Brent was a "family friend." The major had made his acquaintance at his club and brought him home to dine one day when Rosa was a winsome, tumbling baby; and although he had grown grayer and stouter during the years he had been coming out to the farm, ostensibly to oversee Rosa's painting—for which he never would hear of compensation—he had not faltered in a certain purpose conceived soon after that first visit, and as unsuspected by Mrs. Jones and her two elder daughters as it was patent to Rosa herself.

There were some rare affinities between them, even aside from their painting. Brent's British phlegm was mellowed by a luxuriance of imagination that he had inherited from an East Indian mother. His temperament was a mixture of vigor, warmth and languor; and while he was not in the least degree adaptable, he had a faculty of changing the atmosphere of a company to suit himself; so that if others were not pleased it seemed to be they, not he, who was out of place. If they yielded up their individuality to his, well and good; if not, they dropped out of the talk; that was all. Brent was a fluent and entertaining talker. He liked to tell stories of tiger hunts and other jungle pastimes; and Rosa, reclining with her dreamy eyes half shut, liked to listen and feel herself pleasantly thrilled and excited without other necessity than to give up her mind to follow where he led.

Her education had been desultory and superficial. Brent had played the largest part in it, and he had molded her nature at his pleasure by catering to certain biases that he had perceived to be unchangeable, and for the rest giving her the side of life and affairs which he preferred her to believe. What other experiences he had had besides those he chose to tell them, these innocent women neither conjectured nor troubled themselves to inquire. It was enough that he had been "the major's friend."

He had lodgings in town, but his landlady scarcely ever saw him; for when he was not roaming around upon one of his sketching tours he seemed to live in the Corcoran Art Gallery, where Rosa painted under his superintendence several hours each week. He had really devoted himself to the girl's development with a zeal beyond what would have appeared to be necessary in the "family friend." Perhaps Rosa thanked him in private, for she never did so before the others. She treated him always with the same indolent familiarity, and accepted his advice, his help and his devotion as a mere matter of course; but she generally did as he bade her.

This afternoon she continued to fill in her charcoal outlines until she grew tired, and then, dropping her brushes, slipped to a cushion and, crossing her hands behind her head, leaned back and looked up at him like a weary seraph.

"Lazy child," said Brent, smiling, and taking her dropped brushes. "That stem is well done, Rosa; but I want you to leave flowers for a while and begin on that study of the nurse and child. It is time for you to begin to think less of technic and study the masters. I wish you could go abroad now."

"You have made me think of nothing but technic," said the girl.

"Certainly. There are many stages in art, and that is the preliminary one. But you are now to make an advance. How little you realize your advantages. If I had your genius!"

"I realize one advantage—having you for a teacher," she said in a low tone.

The others had dropped away, and they were by themselves.

Brent moved closer to her. "Have you thought of what I talked to you about?"

"It's no use to talk about that; I rather think they expect me to make a great match, some time. Mamma wouldn't consider you eligible, you know," she drawled, softly, with smooth, matchless insolence.

Brent looked at her with an expression she did not understand; but she never troubled herself about what was beyond her easy comprehension. And herein Brent had vastly the advantage; he understood her to the depths of her nature, and he knew perfectly that he had made himself an essential part of her existence. But he was wise enough to be patient. For the present he allowed her to waive the subject aside; nor did he betray even by the quiver of an eyelash that she had wounded his self-love. Indeed, their temperaments were much alike, and neither one was troubled with sensitiveness. Of the two the robust, mastiff-like man had more than the brown-eyed angel, who now took to the hammock and left him to finish her work; for it was as natural for him to work as it was for her to be idle.

"You must get settled in town early this fall," he said to the mother, when the family had assembled again on the veranda after dinner. "I have laid out a good winter's work for Rosa at the gallery, and I want her to start as soon as possible."

"Mr. Brent, I admire your coolness," commented Caroline. "If you expect Rosa to put in a steady winter's work you must have suddenly created a remarkable change in her."

"I really don't see how we are to go to town at all this winter," said Mrs. Jones, wrinkling her pretty forehead. "The Farleys haven't yet positively pledged themselves to take the place, as we depended on their doing; and of course we can't go unless we let this house."

"Oh, the Farleys will take the place," said Brent confidently. "And there is a nice little house on "H" Street that will be vacant about the first of October. I wish you would go in to-morrow and look at it."

"Give me the address," said Caroline. "I have to go in town to-morrow, and I'll take a peep at it. Then, if it seems worth while for you to take the trouble, mamma dear, you can go in next week."

"Only don't let it slip through your fingers," counseled Brent. "Rosa, don't you want to take a little walk up the hill and see the sunset?"

"Get the wheelbarrow!" said Minnie, briskly. "You'll never get Rosa to climb the hill."

But Brent continued to look smilingly at Rosa, and, somewhat to their surprise, she got up and went with him. As they began to climb the gentle slope he took hold of her arm, and she leaned against him with the same unconcern with which she would have accepted aid from one of her sisters. They were gone half an hour, and when they came back a close observer might have noted a satisfied look in Brent's face. He had made a slight, very slight, advance in his plans, whatever they were.

It was in accordance with them that the family moved into the little house on "H" Street within a fortnight. Every afternoon saw Rosa seated before a Corot in the main gallery of the Corcoran Art Building, and for at least two hours she was busily occupied. Just how it came about no one could have said. Perhaps Rosa herself was not aware of the tightening of a leash which had been woven securely about her, and that had guided and now held her to certain duties. Once, as he sat beside her, painting away upon his small canvas with those minute, exquisite touches which characterized his style, Brent said, with some significance:

"You work very well under direction, Rosa; but you wouldn't set a stroke if I were not here, would you?"

She laughed, and turned her eyes upon him inquiringly. "Wouldn't I?" she asked; "ah, well, perhaps not. But then, you see, you are here."

"You have grown so used to having me always at hand, that you couldn't get on at all without me, could you?"

"Get on without you?" she repeated. "Why, I never thought of it."

The next day he let her think of it. For a week he was absent on a sketching tour. When he returned he discovered that she had taken a vacation also; and then, for the first time in her life, he said a few stern words to her. They were very few, and without any hint of anger; but the girl crimsoned, and opened her eyes pathetically. Any other man would have been self-condemned; but Brent, while instantly resuming his usual manner, did not lessen the effect of his rebuke; and from this time her manner toward him began to undergo a change. It was imperceptible to others, but apparent to Brent. She was no longer so sweetly insolent to him; she was more timid, more tractable; and she attended more steadily to her work, seeming to set a new value upon the praise of which he had always been lavish.

The winter passed and the enervating air of April crept over the city. One afternoon Rosa threw down her brushes petulantly, exclaiming that she could not make another stroke.

Brent quietly gathered her implements and his own and stored them neatly away. Then he laid his hand over hers and said, in a perfectly matter-of-fact tone:

"Let's go and get married, Rosa?"

For a minute they looked at one another in silence. Then her eyes dropped to her dress, a pink print, fresh and crisp under the great gray apron which she had begun to untie.

"What! In a calico dress?" she said.

"Yes, just as you are; and now."

"What will they say at home?"

"Think how much trouble we are going to save your mother. We will tell them this evening. Come, Rosa, I have been waiting for you a good many years; don't keep me waiting any longer."

"It is dreadfully absurd," she observed. "What will you do with me?"

"Take you abroad next week, and when we come back settle you down in the prettiest little house you ever saw. I have bought one up on Capitol Hill, and you shall be its little mistress."

"I don't like housekeeping," remarked Rosa; but she was walking with him toward the door. Suddenly she stopped. "We can't get married without a license, can we?"

"I have the license," said Brent, touching his waistcoat pocket. "I got it yesterday."

"It seems to me," she said, pouting a little, "You were rather premature. How did you know I would have you?"

"I believed in my lucky star. We were meant for each other, my dear."

She was silent after this. They walked half-a-dozen squares and stopped before a house next to a church. As Brent rang the bell he saw that the girl was trembling slightly, and he lost no time in getting her into the parlor, where a puzzled minister came to them a moment or so later. Brent explained and produced the license. Rosa was nineteen and her father was not living. There was no delay, and in the presence of the minister's wife and daughter (who took the bride for a pretty servant girl and were condescending) the ceremony was performed. But for the heavy ring that encircled her finger the girl might have believed that she was dreaming, as Brent drew her out of the house again and hailed a passing horse-car to take them to her mother's house.

Minnie opened the door, and through the dusk her quick eyes perceived something unusual in her sister; but Brent, giving her no time for questions, drew his wife into the little parlor, where the widow sat with her sewing.

"Mrs. Jones," he said calmly, "Rosa and I are married." As she got up hastily, the color rushing to her face, he added, "I believe my old friend the major would not have refused to give me his daughter."

It was a stroke of genius. Instead of uttering the angry words upon her lips the widow fell back upon her chair, crying. The major, dead, was not less the family oracle; and even the girls, who had burst into exclamations, and were not to be repressed for half an hour or so, felt that, irregular and shocking as the affair was, yet there was within it a grain of amelioration.

"But that she should have got married in a sixpenny calico!" exclaimed Caroline, tearfully. "I never shall get over that."

"I will buy her a gown or two in Paris," said the new brother-in-law. "We shall sail next week, and be gone a year, or perhaps longer."

But three years passed before the little house on Capitol Hill had to be vacated by its tenant in favor of the owners, who walked in upon the Jones family one day, when the harvest apples were ripe, and the two girls sat upon the porch of the farm-house paring a bowlful of them for supper.

"What is the change in Rosa?" mother and sisters asked each other when the pair had gone back to town the next morning. Mrs. Brent was even more beautiful than she had been as a girl. She did not look unhappy. Yet there was a difference.

The family found out what it meant when they began to visit the little house in town. Rosa had found another guide than her own sweet will. She no longer idled the days away, but sat patiently upon her little stool and painted from morning till late in the afternoon, while Brent—the personification of vigilance—hovered about, pipe in mouth, seeing to the thousand and one things about the house, which, except for his superintendence, kept itself, and dividing the rest of his attention between Rosa's canvas and his own.

"Do you know," said Caroline, indignantly, "that Rosa—our lazy little Rosa—has made fifteen hundred dollars the past year, while Brent has only made three hundred?"

"That's what he married her for," said Minnie, with a rapid inspiration. "I wondered what impelled him. I thought it wasn't love."

"My dear, he seems very fond of her," said Mrs. Jones, divided between a wish to cry and a wish to make the best of it.

"He is fond of her," declared Caroline, "and she's fond of him. But if ever a girl found a master she has. He makes her work as I never expected to see Rosa work. Not at housework, dear me, no! She is not to waste her precious strength on such things. She is to devote herself to art, which is to make her reputation and his living. That's all there is to it."

"Perhaps it is not the worst thing that could have happened to her," mused Minnie. "There is a kind of nature that needs to be compelled to make the best of itself."

"Don't you want some brute of an Englishman to compel you to make the best of yourself?" snapped Caroline.

"No," answered Minnie, quietly. "What would do for Rosa would never suit me."

"Well, I think we had better go in and take some peaches and straighten up that disorderly house," said the elder sister.

They found Rosa sitting absorbed over a beautiful screen which was a piece of ordered work, to cost a hundred and fifty dollars, while Brent stood at the kitchen door, smoking placidly as he contemplated a tableful of unwashed dishes.

"Come in, sisters both," he said, gaily. "But don't stop Rosa just now; she hates to be interrupted when she is at work."