d into the light from the big window and that a woman's portrait
had been placed upon it. Had Ewing looked at her on the instant he might
have detected that her face seemed to ripple under some wind of emotion.
But his own eyes had been on the portrait.

"That's my mother," he said, unconsciously hushing his voice.

"I should have known it," she answered, with a kind of spurious
animation. "The face is so much like yours. It is a face one seems to
have known before, one of those elusive resemblances that haunt the
mind. It is well done." She ended the speech glibly enough.

"She was beautiful. My father did it. He had that trick of color, as you
call it, or he could never have painted her. She was so slight, but she
had color. And she was quick and fiery. I used to see her rage when I
was very small. I believed there were coals in her eyes, and that
something blew on them inside to make them blaze. I wouldn't know what
it was about, only that it wasn't us she raged at--not my father or me.
I could go up and catch her hand even when she frightened me. And
sometimes, after a while, my father would get excited, too. He was
slower to take fire, but he burned longer. And at last she would become
afraid and grow quiet herself and try to soothe him. I never could tell
what they were at war with."

They looked in silence at the vivid young face on the canvas, a thin,
daring, eager face, a face of delicate features, but strong in a perfect
balance. The eyes were darkly alive.

"You were young when she died?" the woman asked at last.

"Too young to understand. I was eight, I think. There was a lot I shall
never understand. Sometimes my father would tell me about their life
here in the West, but never of the time before they came here. It always
seemed to me that either he or she had quarreled with their people. They
were poor when they came here. We lived in Leadville when I first
remember. My mother sang in a church choir and made a little money and
nights--you'll think this queer--my father played a piano in a dance
hall. They had to live. Days, he painted. He had studied abroad in Paris
and Munich, but he wasn't selling his pictures then. It took him years
to do much of that. Sometimes they were hungry, though I didn't know
it." He paused, overwhelmed by a sudden realization that he was talking
much.

"Tell me more," she said very quietly. "I wish to hear the rest."

"Well, at the last my mother was in bed a long time,