Quietly they crept back into the dark and waited. An hour passed; still Brooke kept at work. Another thirty minutes and they heard the chair move and again they went to the door.
Brooke stood back from the improvised easel, her hands behind her, looking at her work. From the board gazed back the head of the little fox, roughly done, but with the look in its eyes at once hunted, defiant, and pleading,—not an image, a created thing, living and breathing. Through suffering and its kinship had come the revelation to Brooke that if she willed she might be the painter of animals, and as she looked again, Lorenz’ words sounded in her ears. She had felt and suffered, and had seen her vision in the eyes of the hunted beast. She had interpreted it, she felt for what it stood, and now, crude as was the labor, it lived under her brush. She had awakened, but the strength of the vital touch was his, and he could not know it. Kneeling before the chair with clasped hands, as if at some shrine, not to the picture, but to what it stood for, Brooke took new courage.
Before his mother could restrain Adam he had dashed across the kitchen, and stood a moment with his hands resting on his sister’s shoulders. Then, without warning, he tipped back her head and gave her a kiss of genuine boyish enthusiasm, crying, “That’s a living picture all right, Sis. Look out it don’t get away from you. I bet you’ve struck your luck this time.”
In the morning the Cub hastened to the barn. Either the old-fashioned latch had sprung up, or some one had been there before him, for the little fox, having eaten every scrap of food, and thereby gained strength, had gone his way, which, according to the string of footprints, was up in the rock and hemlock country behind the farm. Yet after supper on that night, and all the others that came before the spring thawing, a woman’s figure, wearing a cape under which was concealed a dish of scraps, outwitting Tatters, slipped from the pantry door, and going around the barn, halted at a flat rock set in a group of hemlocks, presently returning with the empty platter, her face wearing as rapt an expression as that of some pious woman of old carrying food to the haunts of hermit or saint of the pillar.