always thinking she should get well,—and then, one day, she died!

30

There was very little left,—only a few dollars; but among the squalid properties of the pitiful little stage where the poor young thing had enacted the last act of her tragedy, was one picture, a Madonna, with the painter’s name, G. Bellini, just decipherable. It was a little picture, twelve inches by sixteen, in a dingy old frame, and not a pretty picture at that. But a kind man, a dealer in antiquities, had given Giuditta one hundred dollars for it. “Think of that, Signore! One hundred dollars for an ugly little black picture no bigger than that!”

“I suppose,” Mr. Grey remarked, as they stood balancing themselves at an angle of many degrees,—“I suppose that the picture was genuine,—else the man 31 would hardly have paid one hundred dollars for it.”

31

“And would it be worth more than that?”

“A trifle,” he replied, rather grimly. “Somewhere among the thousands.”

“But why should they have kept such a picture when they were so poor? Why didn’t they sell it?”

“That would hardly have occurred to them. It was evidently a family heirloom that the girl had taken with her because she loved it. I doubt if she guessed its value. A Bellini! A Giovanni Bellini, in a New York tenement house! Think of it! And now I suppose some millionaire has got it. Likely enough somebody who doesn’t know enough to buy his own pictures! Horrible idea! Horrible!” and Mr. Grey strode along, all but snorting with rage at the thought.

“But tell me more about the little girl,” Blythe entreated, wishing the wind wouldn’t blow her words out of her mouth so rudely. “Her name is Cecilia, you say?” 32

32

“Yes; Cecilia. Dopo is the name they went by, but the nurse doesn’t think it genuine. Her idea is that her Signora was the daughter of some great family, and got herself disowned by marrying an opera singer who subsequently made a fiasco and dropped his name with his fame. She doesn’t think Dopo ever was a family name. It means ‘after,’ you know, and they may have adopted it for its ironical significance.”

“And the poor lady died and 

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