* * * * *

A highly tinted uncle from Oporto arrived in New York just in time to see Querida alive.  He brought with him a parrot.

“Send it to Mrs. Hind-Willet,” whispered Querida with stiffening lips; “uno lavanta la caca y otro la nata.”

A few minutes later he died, and his highly coloured uncle from Oporto sent the bird to Mrs. Hind-Willet and made the thriftiest arrangement possible to transport what was mortal of a great artist to Oporto—­where a certain kind of parrot comes from.

CHAPTER XVI

On the morning of the first day of June Neville came into his studio and found there a letter from Valerie: 

“DEAREST:  I am not keeping my word to you; I am asking you for more time; and I know you will grant it.

“Jose Querida’s death has had a curious effect on me.  I was inclined to care very sincerely for him; I comprehended him better than many people, I think.  Yet there was much in him that I never understood.  And I doubt that he ever entirely understood himself.

“I believe that he was really a great painter, Louis—­and have sometimes thought that his character was mediaeval at the foundations—­with five centuries of civilisation thinly deposited over the bed-rock....  In him there seemed to be something primitive; something untamable, and utterly irreconcilable with, the fundamental characteristics of modern man.

“He was my friend....  Friendship, they say, is a record of misunderstandings; and it was so with us But may I tell you something?  Jose Querida loved me—­in his own fashion.

“What kind of a love it was—­of what value—­I can not tell you.  I do not think it was very high in the scale.  Only he felt it for me, and for no other woman, I believe.

“It never was a love that I could entirely understand or respect; yet,—­it is odd but true—­I cared something for it—­perhaps because, in spite of its unfamiliar and sometimes repellent disguises—­it was love after all.

“And now, as at heart and in mind you and I are one; and as I keep nothing of real importance from you—­perhaps can not; I must tell you that Jose Querida came that day to ask me to marry him.

“I tried to make him understand that I could not think of such a thing; and he lost his head and became violent.  That is how the table fell:—­I had started toward the door when he sprang back to block me, and the low window-sill caught him under the knees, and he fell outward into the yard.

“I know of course that no blame could rest on me, but it was a terrible and dreadful thing that happened there in one brief second; and somehow it seems to have moved in me depths that have never before been stirred.

“The newspapers, as you know, published it merely as an accident—­which it really was.  But they might have made it, by innuendo, a horror for me.  However, they put it so simply and so unsuspiciously that Jose Querida might have been any nice man calling on any nice woman.