One by one, they were selling the treasures they had collected. Now, he understood the meaning of those empty night-caps which Claudina carried away with her every evening. They said the things were broken; they had said it with nervous little glances at each other and then at Claudina. At the time, he had read those glances to mean that it was Claudina who had broken them. But no--it was not Claudina. This was the work of the heavy, the ruthless hand of cruel circumstance in which the frailest china and the sternest metal can be crushed into the dust of destruction. In a moment, as it was all made clear, John found the tears smarting in his eyes. As he stood there in the little shop opposite, he painted the whole picture with rapid strokes of the imagination. The day had come when his father could no longer sell his pictures. Then the two white heads had nodded together of an evening before Claudina came in with the night-caps. More emphatically than ever, they had exclaimed--"You don’t mean to say it’s ten o’clock, Claudina?" And Claudina, laying the box on the table, beginning to take out the night-caps and place forth the treasures before she tucked them up, would vouchsafe the answering nod of her head. At last, one evening, watching the Dresden figure being put to bed, his father had thought of the way out of the difficulty. They had not decided upon it at once. Such determinations as these come from the head alone and have to pass before a stern tribunal of the heart before license is given them. He could just imagine how bitter a tribunal that had been; how inflexibly those two brave hearts had sat in judgment upon so hard a matter; how reluctantly in the end they had given their consent. Then, with the moment once passed, the license once granted, John could see them so vividly, questioning whether they should tell him, their decision that it would not be wise, his father fearing that it would lessen his esteem, his mother dreading that he would feel called upon to help them. Finally, that first day, when the Treasure Shop had been opened and his father, the artist, the man of temperament, with all the finest perceptions and sensibilities that human nature possesses, had gone to business. So truly he could see the moment of his departure. Nothing had been said. He had just taken the little old white-haired lady in his arms and kissed her. That was all. It might have been that he was merely going out, as he had quietly said that morning, to see about the framing of a picture. No one would ever have thought that he was about to pass through the ordeal of becoming a shop-keeper, because, in his old age he had failed as an artist. All this, incident by incident, he painted, a sequence of pictures in his mind.