By a miracle, the canvas, though "butter-side-down," had escaped unscathed. Not until she was assured of this did the culprit speak.
"I'm a disgrace to the class," she said, "and expulsion is the only remedy. Tell Mr. Salome that I have forfeited every right to membership, and it's quite possible that I may never exaggerate another detail as long as I live."
"Time's up in two minutes," Mary Downing remarked, in her matter-of-fact voice, as she dabbed some yellow-ochre upon her subject's chin. "I rather think you'll come back to-morrow."
"But I do think it's somebody's else turn to work behind her," said Josephine Wilkes.
Miss Ricker gave a faint, assenting smile.
"I think Miss Ricker is very much indebted to Artful Madge," Harriet Wells declared. "There isn't another girl in the class who could have knocked that easel over without damaging the picture."
"Practice makes perfect," some one observed; and then, time being called, everybody began talking at once, and wit and wisdom were alike lost upon the company.
But Artful Madge was not to be lightly consoled.
"Mother," she said, that same afternoon, as she came into the little sitting-room over the front entry, where her mother was stitching on the sewing-machine, "I think I should like to do something useful. I'm kind of tired of art."
Madge had been helping wash the luncheon dishes, and was beginning to wonder whether her talents were not, perhaps, of a purely domestic order.
"I should think you _would_ be tired of it!" said Mrs. Burtwell, in perfect good faith, as she snipped the thread at the end of a seam. "How you can make up your mind to spend all your days bedaubing your clothes with those nasty paints passes my comprehension."
"But sometimes I daub the canvas," Madge protested, with unwonted meekness, as she drew a grey woollen sock over her hand, and pounced upon a small hole in the toe; and at that very instant, which Madge was whimsically regarding as a possible turning-point in her career, the doorbell rang.
"A gintleman to see you, Miss," said Nora, a moment later, handing Madge a card.
"To see me?" asked Madge, incredulously, as she read the name, "Mr. Philip Spriggs! Are you sure he didn't ask for Father?"
But Nora was quite clear that she had not made a mistake.