interest by all admirers of his skillful
technique and marvelous coloring."

Mary Louise read this twice, trying to understand what it meant. Then
she read it a third time.

"How strangely we have all been deceived in Alora's father!" she
murmured. "I remember that Gran'pa Jim once claimed that any man so
eccentric might well possess talent, but even Mr. Jones' own daughter
did not believe he was a true artist. And Alora never guessed he was
still continuing to paint--alone and in secret--or that he had regained
his former powers and was creating a masterpiece. We have all been
sadly wrong in our judgment of Jason Jones. Only his dead wife knew he
was capable of great things."

She dropped the paper, still somewhat bewildered by the remarkable
discovery.

"And he is here in Chicago, too!" she mused, continuing her train of
thought, "and we all thought he was stupidly learning to fly in
Dorfield. Oh, now I understand why he allowed Alora to go with us. He
wanted to exhibit his picture--the picture whose very existence he had
so carefully guarded--and knew that with all of us out of the way,
afloat upon the Great Lakes, he could come here without our knowledge
and enter the picture in the exhibition. It may be he doubted its
success--he is diffident in some ways--and thought if it failed none of
us at home would be the wiser; but I'm sure that now he has won he will
brag and bluster and be very conceited and disagreeable over his
triumph. That is the man's nature--to be cowed by failure and bombastic
over success. It's singular, come to think it over, how one who has the
soul to create a wonderful painting can be so crude and uncultured, so
morose and--and--cruel."

Suddenly she decided to go and look at the picture. The trip would help
to relieve her loneliness and she was eager to see what Jason Jones had
really accomplished. The Institute was not far from her hotel; she
could walk the distance in a few minutes; so she put on her hat and set
out for the exhibition.

On her way, disbelief assailed her. "I don't see how the man did it!"
she mentally declared. "I wonder if that item is just a huge joke,
because the picture was so bad that the reporter tried to be ironical."

But when she entered the exhibition and found a small crowd gathered
around one picture--it was still early in the day--she dismissed at
once that doubtful supposition.

"That is the Jason Jones picture," said an attendant, answering her
qu