Sheila, alone there in the garret studio above the city, cried to her father and shook him, till, in very terror of her own frenzy in the face of his stillness, she grew calm and laid herself down beside him, put his dead arm around her, nestled her head against his shoulder. She was seventeen years old, left alone and penniless in the old world that he had just pronounced so good. She lay there staring at the stars till they faded, and the cold, clear eye of day looked down into the room. CHAPTER II SYLVESTER HUDSON COMES FOR HIS PICTURE Back of his sallow, lantern-jawed face, Sylvester Hudson hid successfully, though without intention, all that was in him whether of good or ill. Certainly he did not look his history. He was stoop-shouldered, pensive-eyed, with long hands on which he was always turning and twisting a big emerald. He dressed quietly, almost correctly, but there was always something a little wrong in the color or pattern of his tie, and he was too fond of brown and green mixtures which did not become his sallowness. He smiled very rarely, and when he did smile, his long upper lip unfastened itself with an effort and showed a horizontal wrinkle halfway between the pointed end of his nose and the irregular, nicked row of his teeth. Altogether, he was a gentle, bilious-looking sort of man, who might have been anything from a country gentleman to a moderately prosperous clerk. As a matter of fact, he was the owner of a dozen small, not too respectable, hotels through the West, and had an income of nearly half a million dollars. He lived in Millings, a town in a certain Far-Western State, where flourished the most pretentious and respectable of his hotels. It had a famous bar, to which rode the sheep-herders, the cowboys, the ranchers, the dry-farmers of the surrounding country--yes, and sometimes, thirstiest of all, the workmen from more distant oil-fields, a dangerous crew. Millings at that time had not yielded to the generally increasing "dryness" of the West. It was "wet," notwithstanding its choking alkali dust; and the deep pool of its wetness lay in Hudson's bar, The Aura. It was named for a woman who had become his wife. When Hudson came to New York he looked up his Eastern patrons, and it was one of these who, knowing Arundel's need, encouraged the hotel-keeper in his desire to secure a "jim-dandy picture" for the lobby of The Aura and took him for the purpose to Marcus's studio. On that morning, hardly a fortnight before the artist's death, Sheila was not at home.