When Roger Wade’s Aunt Bella died she left him forty thousand dollars in five-per-cent railway bonds and six hundred and ninety acres of wilderness extending from the outskirts of Deer Spring village to the eastern shore of Lake Wauchong, in northern New Jersey. She had contrived to quarrel and break with all her other relations. This was no easy undertaking, and in its success was a signal tribute to her force of character; for, each and everyone of those relatives knew of her possessions and longed and hoped for them and stood ready to endure, even to welcome, any outrage she might see fit to perpetrate. Roger she had not seen in fourteen years—not since he, a youth of eighteen, a painter born, long and lean, with a shock of black-brown hair and dreamy, gray-brown eyes, left his native Deer Spring to study in Paris. He and she had not communicated, either directly or indirectly—a fortunate[2] circumstance for him, as several of Arabella Wade’s bitterest quarrels had begun and had progressed to the irreparable breach altogether by mail. Besides not knowing him she had but one other reason for choosing him as her heir: a year before her death and a week before her last will she happened to read on the cable page of a New York newspaper an enthusiastic note about his pictures and his success in Paris. So the bonds and the land went to him instead of to a missionary society.

When

[2]

Much American newspaper puffery of Americans abroad is sheer invention, designed to give us at home the pleasing notion that we are capturing the earth. But this notice of Roger Wade’s career had truth in it. He was doing extraordinarily well for so young a man. His sense of color and form was lifted toward genius by imagination and originality. His ability had no handicap of cheap and petty—and glaring—eccentricity, such as so often enters into the composition of an original and boldly imaginative temperament to mar its achievement and to retard the recognition of its merit. Thus he speedily made a notable place for himself. He could count on disposing of enough pictures to bring him in fifteen to twenty thousand francs a year; and that sum was about as much as he, simple of tastes, single-hearted in devotion to his work and indifferent to[3] pose and pretense, could find time and opportunity to spend. He knew that in a few years far more money than he needed would be forced upon him—a prospect which he had the good sense to view with distrust when he thought of it at all. About the only thing that had stood in his way was his personal appearance. As one of his friends—Berthier, whose panels will be admired so long as the pale, mysterious glories of their elusive colors 

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