It made me feel like a little girl again to have him begin the story of the moose, and tell it word for word as he always had.  He was forced to stop often now, and wait for breath to come back to him.  At each of these halts beside the road, which was white in the clear spring sunshine, it was harder and harder to think of breaking in on him with my discovery.

As he finally told about Jedediah’s wounded virtue on his deathbed—­that outcry which seemed to me the most brazen part of the whole imposture—­suddenly my heart softened, and I, too, believed that by that time of his life old Jed was—­I really don’t know just what it was that I believed, but it was something as comforting as the quiet warmth of the sunshine.

We were standing by the sunken old grave when grandfather finished.  I looked at him, the sun shining down on his bent figure and bared white head, the flowers reflecting their brightness up into his withered old face, and a lump came into my throat.  I could not have told him if I had wished to.

“We were ashamed to look the dead man in the face,” he said humbly, and laid the flowers down on the young grass.

Then I went around and held his dear old hand tightly in mine; and we stood very still for a long, long time.

THE ARTIST

“After the sickening stench of personality in theatrical life,” the great Madame Orloff told the doctor with her usual free-handed use of language, “it is like breathing a thin, pure air to be here again with our dear inhuman old Vieyra.  He hypnotizes me into his own belief that nothing matters—­not broken hearts, nor death, nor success, nor first love, nor old age—–­nothing but the chiaroscuro of his latest acquisition.”

The picture-dealer looked at her in silence, bringing the point of his white beard up to his chin with a meditative fist.  The big surgeon gazed about him with appreciative eyes, touched his mustache to his gold-lined coffee-cup, and sighed contentedly.  “You’re not the only one, my dear Olga,” he said, “who finds Vieyra’s hard heart a blessing.  When I am here in his magnificent old den, listening to one of his frank accounts of his own artistic acumen and rejoicing in his beautiful possessions, why the rest of the world—­real humanity—­seems in retrospect like one great hospital full of shrieking incurables.”

“Oh, humanity——!” The actress thrust it away with one of her startling, vivid gestures.

“You think it very clever, my distinguished friends, to discuss me before my face,” commented the old picture-dealer indifferently.  He fingered the bright-colored decorations on his breast, looking down at them with absent eyes.  After a moment he added, “and to show your in-ti-mate knowledge of my character.”  Only its careful correctness betrayed the foreignness of his speech.

There was a pause in which the three gazed idly at the fire’s reflection in the brass of the superb old andirons Then, “Haven’t you something new to show us?” asked the woman.  “Some genuine Masaccio, picked up in a hill-town monastery—­a real Ribera?”