I was unable to resist the opportunity, and, affecting considerable surprise, interrupted him with the apparently guileless query:
“Why, how did you know that?”
Professor Keredec’s laughter rumbled again, growing deeper and louder till it reverberated in the woods and a hundred hale old trees laughed back at him.
“Ho, ho, ho!” he shouted. “But you shall not take me for a window-curtain spy! That is a fine reputation I give myself with you! Ho, ho!”
Then, followed submissively by “that other monsieur,” he strode into the path and went thundering forth through the forest.
CHAPTER VI
No doubt the most absurd thing I could have done after the departure of Professor Keredec and his singular friend would have been to settle myself before my canvas again with the intention of painting—and that is what I did. At least, I resumed my camp-stool and went through some of the motions habitually connected with the act of painting.
I remember that the first time in my juvenile reading I came upon the phrase, “seated in a brown study,” I pictured my hero in a brown chair, beside a brown table, in a room hung with brown paper. Later, being enlightened, I was ambitious to display the figure myself, but the uses of ordinary correspondence allowed the occasion for it to remain unoffered. Let me not only seize upon the present opportunity but gild it, for the adventure of the afternoon left me in a study which was, at its mildest, a profound purple.