'Your hair is the color of port wine, Theo,' John Vanderlyn had once told her as he worked on one of the countless sketches of her that her father commissioned. She had thought this very funny then, partly because at thirteen all compliments are amusing—if one could call it a compliment—and partly because his heavy Dutch manner and intonation seemed so incongruous. Since then Vanderlyn had spent four years studying in France, and now he was back, having justified her father's faith in him by becoming an accomplished artist.

'Gilbert Stuart is all very well, if you like that swashbuckling style of portraiture,' Aaron had once remarked, 'but to my mind Vanderlyn will develop the greater gift'. And so, with one of his characteristic lavish gestures, he had sent the young wagon-painter abroad.

John Vanderlyn had acquired more arts than that of brush-wielding, Theo thought with detached amusement. Last week, she and her father had gone down to the wharves on South Street to welcome him home. As he disembarked from the stout brig which had battled head winds for eight stormy weeks from Le Havre, she had not at first recognized him. Such a beau he had become!—in his plum-colored silk coat, elaborately frilled neckcloth, and jet shoe buckles, and his lanky flaxen hair, that used to be so unkempt, now neatly confined in a beribboned queue.

Vanderlyn had kissed her hand with all the grace of a French courtier, of Talleyrand himself, murmuring: 'Ah, glorious Théo! Mais vous êtes vraiment éblouissante! More beautiful than any of the lovely ladies I have seen in France'—with just that blend of boldness and gallantry which signalized a man of the world. But there had been genuine startled admiration, too, in his Dutch-blue eyes.

Her father had laughed complacently. 'My little Miss Prissy has turned into a reigning belle, hasn't she? I trust it won't addle her giddy head, or all my theories for bringing up females may go for naught.'

Theo had looked up at her father to meet his half-serious, half-teasing gaze. She had made a saucy face at him, and the anxious shadow faded from his darkly brilliant eyes. They understood each other well. Aaron's love and pride sustained her like a great warm river: all-pervading, irresistible. Her being floated on it joyously. And if sometimes the stream turned cold and turbulent, if sometimes his constant concern for her welfare or her intellectual progress seemed harsh or irksome, she simply flogged herself to greater effort. It was unthinkable, monstrous, that she should ever disappoint him.

Her father had been pleased with her lately. She now stretched luxuriously against the frilled pillows, flinging her arms above her head. The hundred lines of Plautus which she had memorized last week had delighted him no less than her spirited interpretation of one of Gabriel-Marie's minuets on the new pianoforte.