paint. Nobody around there so
much as knew he did it, the farm was so far from neighbors.

"'Twas a real lonely place, she told me, and she had been glad to marry
and come down in the valley to live closer to folks. Her uncle had given
her her wedding outfit. He had done real well by them all, and they were
grateful; and now he was getting feeble and had trouble with his heart,
they wanted to do something for him. They had thought, perhaps, they could
sell some of his pictures for enough to hire a man to help him with the
farm work. She had heard that pictures were coming into fashion more than
they had been, and she had borrowed that one of her little sister and the
kittie, and without her uncle's knowing anything about it, had sent it
off. She was about discouraged waiting for somebody down in the city to
make up his mind whether he'd buy it or not.

"I asked her a thousand other questions but she could answer none of them.
The only detail I could get from her being an account of her uncle's habit
of 'staring' for sometimes a half an hour at something, without once
looking away. She'd seen him stop that way, when he'd be husking corn
maybe, and stare at a place where a sunbeam came in on a pile of corn. It
put him back quite considerable in his work, that habit, but they had
nothing to complain of. He'd done well by them, when you considered they
weren't his own children.

"'Hadn't he ever tried to break away?' I asked her amazed. 'To leave them?
To go back?'

"She told me: 'Oh, no, he was the only support his mother and his sister
had, and there were all the little children. He _had_ to stay.'"

The actress broke in fiercely: "Oh, stop! stop! it makes me sick to hear.
I could boil them in oil, that family! Quick! You saw him? You brought him
away? You--"

"I saw him," said Vieyra, "yes, I saw him."

Madame Orloff leaned toward him, her eyebrows a line of painful attention.

"I drove that afternoon up to a still tinier village in the mountains near
where he lived, and there I slept that night--or, at least, I lay in a
bed."

"Of course, you could not sleep," broke in the listening woman; "I shall
not to-night."

"When dawn came I dressed and went out to wander until people should be
awake. I walked far, through fields, and then through a wood as red as
red-gold--like nothing I ever saw. It was in October, and the sun was late
to rise. When I came out on an uplying heath, the mists were just
beginning to r