"By Jove--a Stroud!" I cried.
He was silent; but I felt him close behind me, breathing a little
quickly.
"What a wonder! Made with a dozen lines--but on everlasting
foundations. You lucky chap, where did you get it?"
He answered slowly: "Mrs. Stroud gave it to me."
"Ah--I didn't know you even knew the Strouds. He was such an
inflexible hermit."
"I didn't--till after. . . . She sent for me to paint him when he
was dead."
"When he was dead? You?"
I must have let a little too much amazement escape through my
surprise, for he answered with a deprecating laugh: "Yes--she's an
awful simpleton, you know, Mrs. Stroud. Her only idea was to have
him done by a fashionable painter--ah, poor Stroud! She thought it
the surest way of proclaiming his greatness--of forcing it on a
purblind public. And at the moment I was _the_ fashionable painter."
"Ah, poor Stroud--as you say. Was _that_ his history?"
"That was his history. She believed in him, gloried in him--or
thought she did. But she couldn't bear not to have all the
drawing-rooms with her.
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