He walked firmly back to the front of the store.
“I forgot at first,” he said, brusquely, “that this picture belongs to someone else.”
The lady looked at him in astonishment. “I do not understand,” she said.
“There's nothing to understand,” he fairly shouted, “except that it belongs to someone else!”
She turned away, but came back to him. “I will give you fifty dollars for it,” she said, in her quiet way.
“Madame,” he thundered at her, “you can stand there and offer me five hundred dollars, and I'm here to tell you that this picture is not for sale. Do you hear?”
“I certainly do,” replied the lady, and walked from the store.
He was a long time in cooling off. “I tell you,” he stormed to a very blue Lake Michigan he was putting into a frame, “it's hers—it's hern—and anybody that comes along here with any nonsense is just going to hear from me!”
In the days which followed he often thought to go out and speak to her, but perhaps the old man had a restraining sense of values. He planned some day to go out and tell her the picture was hers, but that seemed a silly thing to tell her, for surely she knew it anyway. He worried a good deal about her cough, which seemed to be getting worse, and he had it all figured out that when cold weather came he would have her come in where it was warm, and take her look in there. He felt that he knew all about her, and though he did not know her name, though he had never heard her speak one word, in some ways he felt closer to her than to any one else in the world.
Yet if the old man had known just how it was with the girl it is altogether unlikely that he would have understood. It would have mystified and disappointed him had he known that she had never seen a pine forest or a mountain in her life. Indeed there was a great deal about the little girl which the old man, together with almost all the rest of the world, would not have understood.