“And soon I had it all,” the narrator went on.  “Almost more than I could bear.  The old woman could tell me what I wished to know, she said.  He was her uncle, the only brother of her mother, and he had brought up her and her brothers and sisters.  She knew... oh, she knew with good reason, all of his life.  All, that is, but the beginning.  She had heard from the older people in the valley that he had been wild in his youth (he has always been, she told me gravely, ‘queer’) and she knew that he had traveled far in his young days, very, very far.”

“‘To New York?’ I ventured.

“‘Oh, no, beyond that.  Across the water.’

“‘To Paris?’

“That she didn’t know.  It was a foreign country at least, and he had stayed there two, three years, until he was called back by her father’s death—­his brother-in-law’s—­to take care of his mother, and his sister and the children.  Here her mind went back to my question, and she said she had something perhaps I could tell from, where he had been.  She kept it in her Bible.  He had given it to her when she was a child as a reward the day she had kept her little brother from falling in the fire.  She brought it out.  It was a sketch, hasty, vigorous, suggestive, haunting as the original itself, of the Leonardo da Vinci Ste. Anne.

“Yes, I told her, now I knew where he had been.  And they had called him back from there—­here?

“‘When my father died,’ she repeated, ’my uncle was all my grandmother and my mother had.  We were five little children, and the oldest not seven, and we were all very poor,’

“‘How old was your uncle then?’ I asked.

“‘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?