t I wished to know, she said. He was
her uncle, the only brother of her mother, and he had brought up her and
her brothers and sisters. She knew... oh, she knew with good reason, all
of his life. All, that is, but the beginning. She had heard from the older
people in the valley that he had been wild in his youth (he has always
been, she told me gravely, 'queer') and she knew that he had traveled far
in his young days, very, very far."

"'To New York?' I ventured.

"'Oh, no, beyond that. Across the water.'

"'To Paris?'

"That she didn't know. It was a foreign country at least, and he had stayed
there two, three years, until he was called back by her father's
death--his brother-in-law's--to take care of his mother, and his sister
and the children. Here her mind went back to my question, and she said she
had something perhaps I could tell from, where he had been. She kept it in
her Bible. He had given it to her when she was a child as a reward the day
she had kept her little brother from falling in the fire. She brought it
out. It was a sketch, hasty, vigorous, suggestive, haunting as the
original itself, of the Leonardo da Vinci Ste. Anne.

"Yes, I told her, now I knew where he had been. And they had called him
back from there--_here_?

"'When my father died,' she repeated, 'my uncle was all my grandmother and
my mother had. We were five little children, and the oldest not seven, and
we were all very poor,'

"'How old was your uncle then?' I asked.

"'A young man--he was younger than my mother. Perhaps he was twenty-five,'

"I looked at the sketch in my hand. Twenty-five, and called back from
Paris--_here_!

"'When did he go back to Paris?'

"'Oh, he never went back,' She told me this quite placidly, as she said
everything else. 'He never went back at all.'

"He had stayed there the rest of his life, and worked the little farm that
was all his sister had, and made a living for them--not large, the farm
being poor and he not a first-class farmer, but still enough. He had
always been kind to them--if he was quite queer and absent. She had heard
her grandmother say that at first, the first ten years, perhaps, he had
had strange, gloomy savage fits like a person possessed that you read of
in the Bible; but she herself could never remember him as anything but
quiet and smiling. He had a very queer smile unlike anyone else, as I
would notice for myself when I went to see him about the picture. You
could tell him