“Once, when I looked up, I seemed to see a smile behind his close grayish beard—­as if he had the secret, and were amusing himself by holding it back from me.  That exasperated me still more.  The secret?  Why, I had a secret worth twenty of his!  I dashed at the canvas furiously, and tried some of my bravura tricks.  But they failed me, they crumbled.  I saw that he wasn’t watching the showy bits—­I couldn’t distract his attention; he just kept his eyes on the hard passages between.  Those were the ones I had always shirked, or covered up with some lying paint.  And how he saw through my lies!

“I looked up again, and caught sight of that sketch of the donkey hanging on the wall near his bed.  His wife told me afterward it was the last thing he had done—­just a note taken with a shaking hand, when he was down in Devonshire recovering from a previous heart attack.  Just a note!  But it tells his whole history.  There are years of patient scornful persistence in every line.  A man who had swum with the current could never have learned that mighty up-stream stroke. . . .

“I turned back to my work, and went on groping and muddling; then I looked at the donkey again.  I saw that, when Stroud laid in the first stroke, he knew just what the end would be.  He had possessed his subject, absorbed it, recreated it.  When had I done that with any of my things?  They hadn’t been born of me—­I had just adopted them. . . .

“Hang it, Rickham, with that face watching me I couldn’t do another stroke.  The plain truth was, I didn’t know where to put it—­I had never known.  Only, with my sitters and my public, a showy splash of colour covered up the fact—­I just threw paint into their faces. . . . Well, paint was the one medium those dead eyes could see through—­see straight to the tottering foundations underneath.  Don’t you know how, in talking a foreign language, even fluently, one says half the time not what one wants to but what one can?  Well—­that was the way I painted; and as he lay there and watched me, the thing they called my ‘technique’ collapsed like a house of cards.  He didn’t sneer, you understand, poor Stroud—­he just lay there quietly watching, and on his lips, through the gray beard, I seemed to hear the question:  ‘Are you sure you know where you’re coming out?’

“If I could have painted that face, with that question on it, I should have done a great thing.  The next greatest thing was to see that I couldn’t—­and that grace was given me.  But, oh, at that minute, Rickham, was there anything on earth I wouldn’t have given to have Stroud alive before me, and to hear him say:  ’It’s not too late—­I’ll show you how’?