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"I did not know when he went. I was alone in that crimson wood.

"I went back to the village. I went back to the city. I would not speak to him till I had some honor worthy to offer him. I tried to think what would mean most to him. I remembered the drawing of the Ste. Anne. I remembered his years in Paris, and I knew what would seem most honor to him. I cabled Drouot of the Luxembourg Gallery. I waited in New York till he came. I showed him the picture. I told him the story. He was on fire!

"We were to go back to the mountains together, to tell him that his picture would hang in the Luxembourg, and then in the Louvre—that in all probability he would be decorated by the French government, that other pictures of his would live for all time in Paris, in London, in Brussels—a letter came from the woman, his niece. He was dead. "

The actress fell back in her chair, her hands over her face.

The surgeon stirred wrathfully. "Heavens and earth, Vieyra, what a beastly, ghastly, brutally tragic horror are you telling us, anyhow!"

The old Jew moistened his lips and was silent. After a moment he said: "I should not have told you. I knew you could not understand. "

Madame Orloff looked up sharply. "Do you mean—is it possible that you mean that if we had seen him—had seen that look—we would—that he had had all that an artist—"

The picture-dealer addressed himself to her, turning his back on the doctor. "I went back to the funeral, to the mountains. The niece told me that before he died he smiled suddenly on them all and said: ‘I have had a happy life.’ I had taken a palm to lay on his coffin, and after I had looked long at his dead face, I put aside the palm. I felt that if he had lived I could never have spoken to him—could never have told him. "

The old Jew looked down at the decorations on his breast, and around at the picture-covered walls. He made a sweeping gesture.

"What had I to offer him?" he said.