magazine--voluntarily as Milly now
learned--he had got together all his painter's things and worked in the
empty apartment. When Milly began to pick up the odds and ends, she was
surprised at the number of canvases. A few of them she recognized as
pictures he had attempted in his brief vacations. Almost everything was
unfinished--merely an impression seized here and there and vigorously
dashed down in color, as if the artist were afraid of losing its
definite outline in the rush and interruption of his life. Nothing was
really finished she saw, as she turned the canvases back to the wall,
one by one. Tears started to her eyes again. The tragedy of life was
like the tragedy of death--the incomplete! The nearest thing to a
finished picture was the group done in Brittany of herself, Yvonne, and
the baby on the gleaming sands, which he had tried to get ready for the
New York exhibition on their return. That had the superficial finish of
mechanical work from which the creator's inspiration has already
departed. With a sigh she turned it to the wall with the others, and
somehow she recalled what Reinhard has said once about her husband.

"He had more of the artist in him than any of us when he was in
college--what has become of it?"

The remark stabbed her now. What had he done with his gift--what had
they made of it?...

She came to the last things,--the canvas he had been working on the day
his friend had found him. The touch of fever was in it,--a grotesque
head,--but it was as vivid as fresh paint. Yes, he had been one who
could see things! She had a sense of pride in the belief.

Another of Reinhard's sayings came back to her,--

"It's all accident from the very beginning in the womb what comes to any
of us, and most of all whether we catch on in the game of life, whether
we fit!"

The novelist himself, she knew, had not "caught on" at first. He had
confessed to her that he had almost starved in New York, writing stories
that nobody would read and few publishers could be induced to
print--then. They were the uttermost best he had in him, and some had
been successful since, but they didn't fit then. Suddenly he arrived by
accident. A slight thing he had done caught the fancy of an actress, who
had a play made out of it, in which she was a great success. A sort of
reflected glory came to the author of the story, and the actress with
unusual generosity paid him a good sum of money. From that first touch
of golden suc