“Then, afterwards,—” much was comprised in that one word and Joe’s tone, “afterwards we started off together, my Dad and me. He said he’d try and get a job on some farm with me, but nobody wanted him this time of year, and with me too. And he said one morning he wished he didn’t have me bothering around. When I woke up on the freight yesterday morning, he wasn’t there. Guess he must have dropped off. Maybe he can get a job now.” So it slipped out, Joe’s personal history, and the girls wondered at his soldierly acceptance of life’s discipline. Only nine, but already he faced the world as his own master, fearless and optimistic. All through that first evening he sat in the kitchen on the cushioned wood box, playing tunes he had learned from his father. When Shad brought in his big armfuls of logs for the night, he executed a few dance figures on the kitchen floor and “allowed” before he got through Joe would be chief musician at the country dances roundabout. After supper the girls drew up their chairs around the sitting room table as usual. Here every night the three younger ones prepared their lessons for the next day. Jean generally read or sat with her father awhile, but tonight she answered Bab Crane’s letter. It was read over twice, the letter that blended in so curiously with the coming of the cousins from Boston. Ever since Jean could remember she had drawn pictures. In her first primer, treasured with other relics of that far off time when she was six instead of seventeen, she had put dancey legs on the alphabet and drawn very fat young pigs with curly tails chasing each other around the margins of spellers. No one guessed how she loved certain paintings back at the old home in New York. They had seemed so real to her, the face of a Millet peasant lad crossing a stubble field at dawn; a Breton girl knitting as she walked homeward behind some straying sheep; one of Franz Hals’ Flemish lads, his chin pressed close to his violin, his deep eyes looking at you from under the brim of his hat, and Touchstone and Audrey wandering through the Forest of Arden. She had loved to read, as she grew older, of Giotto, the little Italian boy trying to mix colors from brick dust, or drawing with charcoal on the stones of the field where Cimabue the monk walked in meditation; of the world that was just full of romance, full of stories ages old and still full of vivid life. Once she had read of Albrecht Durer, painting his masterpieces while he starved. How the people told in whispers after his death that he had used his heart’s blood to mix with his wonderful pigments. Of course it was all only a story, but Jean remembered it. When she saw a picture that seemed to hold one and speak its message of beauty, she would say to herself, “There is Durer’s secret.” And some day, if she ever could put on canvas the dreams that came to her, she meant to use the same secret.