as I turned, my eye fell on a small picture above the mantel-piece--the
only object breaking the plain oak panelling of the room.

"Oh, by Jove!" I said.

It was a sketch of a donkey--an old tired donkey, standing in the rain
under a wall.

"By Jove--a Stroud!" I cried.

He was silent; but I felt him close behind me, breathing a little
quickly.

"What a wonder! Made with a dozen lines--but on everlasting foundations.
You lucky chap, where did you get it?"

He answered slowly: "Mrs. Stroud gave it to me."

"Ah--I didn't know you even knew the Strouds. He was such an inflexible
hermit."

"I didn't--till after.... She sent for me to paint him when he was
dead."

"When he was dead? You?"

I must have let a little too much amazement escape through my surprise,
for he answered with a deprecating laugh: "Yes--she's an awful
simpleton, you know, Mrs. Stroud. Her only idea was to have him done by
a fashionable painter--ah, poor Stroud! She thought it the surest way
of proclaiming his greatness--of forcing it on a purblind public. And at
the moment I was THE fashionable painter."

"Ah, poor Stroud--as you say. Was THAT his history?"

"That was his history. She believed in him, gloried in him--or thought
she did. But she couldn't bear not to have all the drawing-rooms with
her. She couldn't bear the fact that, on varnishing days, one could
always get near enough to see his pictures. Poor woman! She's just a
fragment groping for other fragments. Stroud is the only whole I ever
knew."

"You ever knew? But you just said--"

Gisburn had a curious smile in his eyes.

"Oh, I knew him, and he knew me--only it happened after he was dead."

I dropped my voice instinctively. "When she sent for you?"

"Yes--quite insensible to the irony. She wanted him vindicated--and by
me!"

He laughed again, and threw back his head to look up at the sketch
of the donkey. "There were days when I couldn't look at that
thing--couldn't face it. But I forced myself to put it here; and now
it's cured me--cured me. That's the reason why I don't dabble any more,
my dear Rickham; or rather Stroud himself is the reason."

For the first time my idle curiosity about my companion turned into a
serious desire to understand him better.

"I wish you'd tell me how it happened," I said.

He stood looking up at the sketch, and twirling between his fingers a
cigarette he had forgotten to light. Suddenly he turned toward me.

"I'd rather like t