“Did you really go?” asked the doctor.  “I thought you swore that nothing could take you to America.”

“I went,” said the old man grimly.  “Paullsen did me a bad turn once, thirty years ago.  And while I was there I went to see the unknown canvas.  The dealer half apologized for taking my time—­said he did not as a rule pay any attention to freak things brought in from country holes by amateurs, but—­I remember his wording—­this thing, some ways he looked at it, didn’t seem bad somehow.”

The collector paused, passed his tongue over his lips, and said briefly:  “Then he showed it to me.  It was the young girl and kitten in there.”

“By Jove!” cried the doctor.

“You have too exciting a profession, my good old dear,” said the actress.  “Some day you will die of a heart failure.”

“Not after living through that!”

“What did you tell him?”

“I asked for the address of the cousin of his children’s governess, of course.  When I had it, I bought a ticket to the place, and when I reached there, I found myself at the end of all things—­an abomination of desolation, a parched place in the wilderness.  Do you know America, either of you?”

The doctor shook his head.

“I have toured there, three times,” said the actress.

“Did you ever hear of a place called Vermont?”

Madame Orloff looked blank.  “It sounds French, not English.  Perhaps you do not pronounce it as they do.”

“Heaven forbid that I should do anything as ‘they’ do!  This place, then, call it what you will, is inhabited by a lean, tall, sullenly silent race who live in preposterously ugly little wooden houses of the most naked cleanliness ...  God of my Fathers! the hideousness of the huddle of those huts where I finally found the cousin!  He was a seller of letter-paper and cheap chromos and he knew nothing of the picture except that it was brought to him to sell by the countryman who sold him butter.  So I found the address of the butter-maker and drove endless miles over an execrable road to his house, and encountered at last a person who could tell me something of what I wanted to know.  It was the butter-maker’s mother, a stolid, middle-aged woman, who looked at me out of the most uncanny quiet eyes ... all the people in that valley have extraordinary piercing and quiet eyes ... and asked, ’Is it about the picture?  For if it is, I don’t want you should let on about it to anybody but me.  Nobody but the family knows he paints ’em!”

At this the doctor burst out, “Gracious powers!  You don’t mean to say that the man who painted that picture is alive now ... in 1915!”

The actress frowned at the interruption and turned with a lithe petulance on the big Briton.  “If you want to know, let him alone!” she commanded.