Page:Dorothy Canfield--Hillsboro People.djvu/283

 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 by that, and by his being very lame.

"That brought me back with a start. I rushed at her with questions. How about the picture? Were there others? Were there many? Had he always painted? Had he never shown them to anyone? Was he painting now?

"She could not tell me much. It had been a detail of their common life she had but absently remarked, as though she had lived with a man who collected snail-shells, or studied the post-marks on letters. She 'had never noticed'—that was the answer to most of my questions. No, she did not think there were very many now,