Nevertheless, the impulse to know more about the sketch was
the stronger.
"Do you mean you have just bought it?" asked Helen. "It's not English?"
"No," said Sir James, gratified with his companion's interest. "I bought
it in Paris just after the Commune."
"From the artist?" continued Helen, in a slightly constrained voice.
"No," said Sir James, "although I knew the poor chap well enough. You
can easily see that he was once a painter of great promise. I rather
think it was stolen from him while he was in hospital by those
incendiary wretches. I recognized it, however, and bought for a few
francs from them what I would have paid HIM a thousand for."
"In hospital?" repeated Helen dazedly.
"Yes," said Sir James. "The fact is it was the ending of the usual
Bohemian artist's life. Though in this case the man was a real
artist,--and I believe, by the way, was a countryman of yours."
"In hospital?" again repeated Helen. "Then he was poor?"
"Reckless, I should rather say; he threw himself into the fighting
before Paris and was badly wounded. But it was all the result of the
usual love affair--the girl, they say, ran off with the usual richer
man. At all events, it ruined him for painting; he never did anything
worth having afterwards."
"And now?" said Helen in the same unmoved voice.
Sir James shrugged his shoulders. "He disappeared. Probably he'll turn
up some day on the London pavement--with chalks. That sketch, by the
way, was one that had always attracted me to his studio--though he never
would part with it. I rather fancy, don't you know, that the girl had
something to do with it. It's a wonderfully realistic sketch, don't you
see; and I shouldn't wonder if it was the girl herself who lived behind
one of those queer little windows in the roof there."
"She did live there," said Helen in a low voice.
Sir James uttered a vague laugh. Helen looked around her. The duchess
had quietly and unostentatiously passed into the library, and in full
view, though out of hearing, was examining, with her glass to her eye,
some books upon the shelves.
"I mean," said Helen, in a perfectly clear voice, "that the young girl
did NOT run away from the painter, and that he had neither the right nor
the cause to believe her faithless or attribute his misfortunes to her."
She hesitated, not from any sense of her indiscretion, but to recover
from a momentary doubt if the girl were really her own self--but only
for a momen
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