nd you can
never reckon what _they'll_ do. The very day Martin Joliffe died there
was a story of someone coming to buy the picture of him. I was at
church in the afternoon, and Miss Joliffe at the Dorcas meeting, and
Anastasia gone out to the chemist. When I got back, I came up to see
Martin in this same room, and found him full of a tale that he had heard
the bell ring, and after that someone walking in the house, and last his
door opened, and in walked a stranger. Martin was sitting in the chair
I'm using now, and was too weak then to move out of it; so he was forced
to sit until this man came in. The stranger talked kindly to him, so he
said, and wanted to buy the picture of the flowers, bidding as high as
twenty pounds for it; but Martin wouldn't hear him, and said he wouldn't
let him have it for ten times that, and then the man went away. That
was the story, and I thought at the time 'twas all a cock-and-bull tale,
and that Martin's mind was wandering; for he was very weak, and seemed
flushed too, like one just waken from a dream. But he had a cunning
look in his eye when he told me, and said if he lived another week he
would be Lord Blandamer himself, and wouldn't want then to sell any
pictures. He spoke of it again when his sister came back, but couldn't
say what the man was like, except that his hair reminded him of
Anastasia's.

"But Martin's time was come; he died that very night, and Miss Joliffe
was terribly cast down, because she feared she had given him an overdose
of sleeping-draught; for Ennefer told her he had taken too much, and she
didn't see where he had got it from unless she gave it him by mistake.
Ennefer wrote the death certificate, and so there was no inquest; but
that put the stranger out of our thoughts until it was too late to find
him, if, indeed, he ever was anything more than the phantom of a sick
man's brain. No one beside had seen him, and all we had to ask for was
a man with wavy hair, because he reminded Martin of Anastasia. But if
'twas true, then there was someone else who had a fancy for the
painting, and poor old Michael must have thought a lot of it to frame it
in such handsome style."

"I don't know," Westray said; "it looks to me as if the picture was
painted to fill the frame."

"Perhaps so, perhaps so," answered the organist dryly. "What made
Martin Joliffe think he was so near success?"

"Ah, that I can't tell you. He was always thinking he had squared the
ci