“Did you not see those signs?  Scoundrel, puppy, foreign-born poacher, didn’t you see my sign-boards?” And as she looked down at him—­Richard’s blood alive and red in a youthful and beautiful body:  and she what she was—­she fell into one of those futile and dreadful fits of rage to which the evil old are subject; and mumbled with her skinny bags of lips, and shook and nodded her deathly head, and waved her claw-like hands, screeching insults and abuse.

The pity died out of Jelnik’s face.  He regarded her with his father’s eyes, the calm, impersonal, passionless gaze of the trained alienist.  She was an unlovely exhibition, to be studied critically.  In some subtle manner she understood, for she jerked herself out of her anger, and fell silent, regarding him with a glance as brilliantly, deadly bright as a tarantula’s.  The cold, relentless hate of that glance chilled him.  He forced himself to bow to her again, and to beat a dignified retreat, when his inclination was to take to his heels like a school-boy caught pilfering apples.

The next morning a bailiff presented Mr. Nicholas Jelnik with a notice forbidding him to enter the grounds of Hynds House without the written permission of the owner, and threatening prosecution should he disobey.

“The Hyndses, as I have said, are good haters,” finished Judge Gatchell.

“And so she left Hynds House to me,” said I without, I am afraid, much gratitude.

“It was hers, to dispose of as she chose.”  The lawyer spoke crisply.  “If you have any scruples, dismiss them.  My late client understood that it was far better for the estate to fall into the hands of a sensible woman like yourself than into the keeping of a young man with what foolish people like to call the artistic temperament, which in plain English means a person who can’t earn his salt in any useful, sensible business.

“You doubt this?  Let us consider this same artistic temperament and its results,” continued the judge, making a wry face.  “Once or twice it has been my bad fortune to meet it.  One trifling scamp I have in mind, painted.  A house, a fence, a barn, even a sign-board?  Not at all, but messes he called ‘The Sea,’ one doesn’t know why, save that the things slightly resembled raw oysters.  However, the women raved over him.  His laundress and his landlady had good cause to rave!

“He wrote, too.  A text-book, a title, a will, a deed, a business letter?  Far from it!  He wrote poetry, if you please!  The little wretch wrote poetry!  That’s what the artistic temperament leads a man to!  Bah!  I hate, I despise, I abhor, the artistic temperament!”

We looked at the judge, open-mouthed.  “Who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?”

“There have been times,” admitted the judge, subsiding, “when I radically disagreed with my late client; when I opposed her strongly.  But when she willed her whole estate to you, Miss Smith, instead of to Nicholas Jelnik, I heartily approved.  Understand, I have no personal bias, no animosity against this young man; but he is, I am told, more or less of an artist, and one might as well leave an estate to an anarchist at once.  I have expressed this opinion to the town at large, and I seldom express my opinion publicly,” finished the old jurist stiffly.