She slipped her arm into his and asked in a whisper what it was. There was no need to talk in a whisper, for Claudina did not know a word of English; but she guessed he was going to say something concerning John and about him, she nearly always spoke in a whisper. "It’s the--the shop," he replied--"I--I don’t like to tell John." "Oh--but why not?" She clung a little closer to him. "It isn’t that I don’t think he would understand--but it’s just like that sentence in his letter about me. I feel it would hurt him if he thought I couldn’t sell my pictures any more. I believe he would blame himself and think he ought to be giving us money, if he knew that I had had to start this curio shop to make things meet more comfortably." She nodded her head wisely. She would have been all for telling her son everything. But when he mentioned the fact of John thinking he ought to support them, and when she considered how John would need every penny that he earned to support the woman whom she longed for him to make his wife--it was a different matter. She quite agreed. It was better that John should be told nothing. "You don’t think he’ll find out--do you?" she said, and her eyes looked startled at the thought. "No--no--I shouldn’t think so. It isn’t as if I had to be there every day. Foscari looks after it quite well. Though I’m always afraid he’ll sell the very things I can’t bear to part with. He sold the old brass Jewish lamp the other day, and I wouldn’t have parted with it for worlds. But I dare say if I tell him to be careful--I dare say----" It was rather sad, this curio shop. It would have been very sad if his wife had not appreciated the need for it; if she had not made it easier by telling him how brave he was, by sharing with him the sense of shame he felt when it became apparent that his pictures were no longer saleable. For when he had reached the age of seventy-three, that was what they had told him. If he had not been a landscape painter, it might have been different; but at seventy-three, when one’s heart is weak, it is not possible, it is not wise, to go far afield, to tramp the mountains as once he had done, in search of subjects new. So, he had been compelled to stay at home, to try and paint from memory the pictures that lay heaped within his mind. Then it was that they began to tell him that they could not sell his work; then he came to find that there must be other means of support if they were not to appeal to John for aid. And so, having a collection of treasures such as artists find, picked up from all the odd corners of Europe, he bethought him of a curio shop and, finding a little place to let at a quiet corner in the _Merceria_, he took it, called it--The Treasure Shop--and painting the name in a quaint old sign which he hung outside, obliterated his identity from the public eye.