“I asked her a thousand other questions but she could answer none of them.  The only detail I could get from her being an account of her uncle’s habit of ‘staring’ for sometimes a half an hour at something, without once looking away.  She’d seen him stop that way, when he’d be husking corn maybe, and stare at a place where a sunbeam came in on a pile of corn.  It put him back quite considerable in his work, that habit, but they had nothing to complain of.  He’d done well by them, when you considered they weren’t his own children.

“‘Hadn’t he ever tried to break away?’ I asked her amazed.  ’To leave them?  To go back?’

“She told me:  ’Oh, no, he was the only support his mother and his sister had, and there were all the little children.  He had to stay.’”

The actress broke in fiercely:  “Oh, stop! stop! it makes me sick to hear.  I could boil them in oil, that family!  Quick!  You saw him?  You brought him away?  You—­”

“I saw him,” said Vieyra, “yes, I saw him.”

Madame Orloff leaned toward him, her eyebrows a line of painful attention.

“I drove that afternoon up to a still tinier village in the mountains near where he lived, and there I slept that night—­or, at least, I lay in a bed.”

“Of course, you could not sleep,” broke in the listening woman; “I shall not to-night.”

“When dawn came I dressed and went out to wander until people should be awake.  I walked far, through fields, and then through a wood as red as red-gold—­like nothing I ever saw.  It was in October, and the sun was late to rise.  When I came out on an uplying heath, the mists were just beginning to roll away from the valley below.  As I stood there, leaning against a tree in the edge of the wood, some cows came by, little, pinched, lean cows and a young dog bounding along, and then, after them, slowly, an old man in gray—­very lame.”

The actress closed her eyes.

“He did not see me.  He whistled to the dog and stroked his head, and then as the cows went through a gate, he turned and faced the rising sun, the light full on his face.  He looked at the valley coming into sight through the mists.  He was so close to me I could have tossed a stone to him—­I shall never know how long he stood there—­how long I had that face before me.”

The narrator was silent.  Madame Orloff opened her eyes and looked at him piercingly.

“I cannot tell you—­I cannot!” he answered her.  ’Who can tell of life and death and a new birth?  It was as though I were thinking with my finger-nails, or the hair of my head—­a part of me I had never before dreamed had feeling.  My eyes were dazzled.  I could have bowed myself to the earth like Moses before the burning bush.  How can I tell you—?  How can I tell you?”

“He was—?” breathed the woman.