It was not till one evening when he had come over to see Dave that the subject was broached. Dave was detained out in the barn, helping his father with a sick farm-horse, and while they were waiting for him in the living-room the talk drifted to Monsieur and his devoted kindness during Louis's illness.
"He simply couldn't do enough for me," the boy asserted. "Beginning with his insisting on my having his room, he loaded me with delicacies and attentions of every sort the whole time. I began by quite despising him, but he's been so jolly good to me that I've just got to like him, whether or no! Honestly, it's almost pathetic sometimes, he tries so hard. I feel like a brute if I don't respond in just the way he wants me to. He's stopped talking about all the things he knows I don't care for, and even stands for my talking about mechanical engineering and that sort of thing. And that's going some for him!"
"Louis," ventured Sue, a little timidly, "do you mind telling us now why you hated and were afraid of that portrait? You were going to tell me that day, if you remember, when we were interrupted."
The boy looked hesitant for a moment. Then he replied:
"I believe I might as well. It can't hurt any one that I can see. I've had the most peculiar feeling about that picture ever since my accident. Before that I'd seen it, of course, but had never thought much about it, and those two others that are covered I only thought were just another eccentricity of Monsieur's. He's awfully eccentric, anyway, about a number of things. But after I landed in that room with my chopped foot, and had to stay there when I didn't want to and lie staring day and night at that picture at the foot of my bed, first I began to hate it and then I actually became afraid of it. You'll hardly believe me, girls, when I tell you that I covered up my head with the bedclothes at times, when I was alone in the room, so that I wouldn't have to look at it."
"But why?" interrupted Carol. "What was strange about it?"
"Well," Louis answered, "it's not so much that there's anything strange about the picture itself; it's more the way it made me feel and the way Monsieur acted about it and—well, a dream I had about it one night."
"A dream?" the girls exclaimed. "What was it?"
"I'll get to that presently," he said. "But first I want to tell you what Monsieur said about it. A day or two after I was taken to that room I asked him whose portrait it was. He said he would tell me all about it some time, but that all he could say at present was that the child had been one of the world's heroic martyrs. That, of course, didn't give me much information, but it made me a little more interested, and I used to lie and stare at it by the hour, wondering how in the world a youngster of six or seven could have been what he said.
"Then came the time when I took that turn for the worse, and they thought it was all up with me. I had a terrible fever and was delirious, too, I guess. And that wretched picture haunted me the whole time. Sometimes it seemed to be coming toward me rapidly, growing larger and larger, and the eyes would glow like balls of fire. I used to scream out loud, because it somehow seemed as if it would wrap itself round me and crush me. Then it would seem to retreat way off where I could hardly see it, and almost disappear through the wall. At other times it would turn over, hang upside down, and cut up all sorts of antics. And all the time I couldn't seem to take my eyes from it.