Page:Dorothy Canfield--Hillsboro People.djvu/97

 Eli admitted: "If you mean you don't see anything in it to make all this hurrah about, I'm with you. It don't look half finished. I don't like that slap-dash style."

She was in a frenzy at their denseness. "Who did it look like?" she challenged them.

"Why, like Uncle Grid, of course. Who else?"

"Yes, yes," she cried; "who else? Who else?"

They looked at each other, afraid that she was crazed, and spoke more gently: "Why, I don't know, I'm sure, who else. Like Grandfather Gridley, of course; but then Uncle Grid always did look like his father."

At this she quite definitely put it out of their power to leave her by fainting away.

They carried her home and laid her on her own bed, where one of them stayed to attend her while the other went back to rescue their deserted baggage. As the door closed behind him the old woman came to herself. "Oh, Stephen," she moaned, "I wish it had killed me, the way it did your uncle."

"What is the matter? " asked her great-nephew wonderingly. "What do you think killed him?"

"That awful, awful picture! I know it now as plain as if I'd been there. He hadn't seen it all the time he was sitting for it, though he'd already put in his will that he wanted the college to have it, and when he did see it" she turned on the merchant with a sudden fury: "How dare you say those are your uncle's eyes!"

He put his hand soothingly on hers. "Now, now, Aunt Melia, maybe the expression isn't just right, but the color is fine ... just that jet-black his were ...