he took alone, and almost always at night.
The policeman tramping towards Four Turnings after midnight to report to
the country patrol would meet him and pause for a minute's chat.
Night-wandering beasts--foxes and owls and hedgehogs--knew his footstep
and unlearned their first fear of it. Sometimes, but not often, you
might surprise him of an afternoon seated before an easel in some
out-of-the-way corner of the cliffs; but if you paused then to look, he
too paused and seemed inclined to smudge out his work. The Vicar put it
about that Mr. Frank had formerly been a painter of fame, and (being an
astute man) one day decoyed him into his library, where hung an
engraving of a picture "Amos Barton" by one F. Bracy. It had made a
small sensation at Burlington House a dozen years before; and the Vicar
liked it for the pathos of its subject--an elderly clergyman beside his
wife's deathbed. To him the picture itself could have told little more
than this engraving, which utterly failed to suggest the wonderful
colour and careful work the artist (a young man with a theory and
enthusiasm to back it) had lavished on the worn carpet and valances of
the bed, as well as on the chestnut hair of the dying woman glorified in
the red light of sunset.

Mr. Frank glanced up at the engraving and turned his face away.
It was the face of a man taken at unawares, embarrassed, almost afraid.
The Vicar, who had been watching him, intending some pleasant remark
about the picture, saw at once that something was wrong, and with great
tact kept the talk upon some petty act of charity in which he sought to
enlist his visitor's help. Mr. Frank listened, gave his promise
hurriedly and made his escape. He never entered the Vicarage again.

III.

Eighteen years had passed since Miss Bracy's interview with Bassett; and
now, late on a summer afternoon, she and Mr. Frank were pacing the
little waterside garden while they awaited their first visitor.

Mr. Frank betrayed the greater emotion, or at any rate the greater
nervousness. Since breakfast he had been unable to sit still or to
apply himself to any piece of work for ten minutes together, until Miss
Bracy suggested the lawn-mower and brought purgatory upon herself.
With that lawn-mower all the afternoon he had been "rattling her brain
to fiddle-strings"--as she put it--and working himself into a heat which
obliged a change of clothes before tea. The tea stood ready now on a
table which