At this she quite definitely put it out of their power to leave her by fainting away.

They carried her home and laid her on her own bed, where one of them stayed to attend her while the other went back to rescue their deserted baggage.  As the door closed behind him the old woman came to herself.  “Oh, Stephen,” she moaned, “I wish it had killed me, the way it did your uncle.”

“What is the matter?” asked her great-nephew wonderingly.  “What do you think killed him?”

“That awful, awful picture!  I know it now as plain as if I’d been there.  He hadn’t seen it all the time he was sitting for it, though he’d already put in his will that he wanted the college to have it, and when he did see it—­” she turned on the merchant with a sudden fury:  “How dare you say those are your uncle’s eyes!”

He put his hand soothingly on hers.  “Now, now, Aunt ’Melia, maybe the expression isn’t just right, but the color is fine... just that jet-black his were ... and the artist has got in exact that funny stiff way uncle’s hair stood up over his forehead.”

The old woman fixed outraged eyes upon him.  “Color!” she said.  “And hair!  Oh, Lord, help me!”

She sat up on the bed, clutching her nephew’s hand, and began to talk rapidly.  When, a half-hour later, the other brother returned, neither of them heard him enter the house.  It was only when he called at the foot of the stairs that they both started and Stephen ran down to join him.

“You’ll see the president ... you’ll fix it?” the old woman cried after him.

“I’ll see, Aunt ’Melia,” he answered pacifyingly, as he drew his brother out of doors.  He looked quite pale and moved, and drew a long breath before he could begin.

“Aunt Amelia’s been telling me a lot of things I never knew, Eli.  It seems that ... say, did you ever hear that Grandfather Gridley, the Governor, was such a bad lot?”

“Why, mother never said much about her father one way or the other, but I always sort of guessed he wasn’t all he might have been from her never bringing us on to visit here until after he died.  She used to look queer, too, when folks congratulated her on having such a famous man for father.  All the big politicians of his day thought a lot of him.  He was as smart as chain-lightning!”

“He was a disreputable old scalawag!” cried his other grandson.  “Some of the things Aunt Amelia has been telling me make me never want to come back to this part of the country again.  Do you know why Uncle Grid lived so poor and scrimped and yet left no money?  He’d been taking care of a whole family grandfather had beside ours; and paying back some people grandfather did out of a lot of money on a timber deal fifty years ago; and making it up to a little village in the backwoods that grandfather persuaded to bond itself for a railroad that he knew wouldn’t go near it.”

The two men stared at each other an instant, reviewing in a new light the life that had just closed.  “That’s why he never married,” said Eli finally.