uncle and
brother-in-law. His mother had laid her hand so engagingly on Fleda
Vetch that in a very few days the girl knew it was possible they should
suffer together in Cadogan Place almost as much as they had suffered
together at Waterbath. The kind colonel's house was also an ordeal, but
the two women, for the ensuing month, had at least the relief of their
confessions. The great drawback of Mrs. Gereth's situation was that,
thanks to the rare perfection of Poynton, she was condemned to wince
wherever she turned. She had lived for a quarter of a century in such
warm closeness with the beautiful that, as she frankly admitted, life
had become for her a kind of fool's paradise. She couldn't leave her own
house without peril of exposure. She didn't say it in so many words, but
Fleda could see she held that there was nothing in England really to
compare to Poynton. There were places much grander and richer, but there
was no such complete work of art, nothing that would appeal so to those
who were really informed. In putting such elements into her hand fortune
had given her an inestimable chance; she knew how rarely well things had
gone with her and that she had tasted a happiness altogether rare.

There had been in the first place the exquisite old house itself, early
Jacobean, supreme in every part: it was a provocation, an inspiration, a
matchless canvas for the picture. Then there had been her husband's
sympathy and generosity, his knowledge and love, their perfect accord
and beautiful life together, twenty-six years of planning and seeking, a
long, sunny harvest of taste and curiosity. Lastly, she never denied,
there had been her personal gift, the genius, the passion, the patience
of the collector--a patience, an almost infernal cunning, that had
enabled her to do it all with a limited command of money. There wouldn't
have been money enough for any one else, she said with pride, but there
had been money enough for her. They had saved on lots of things in life,
and there were lots of things they hadn't had, but they had had in every
corner of Europe their swing among the Jews. It was fascinating to poor
Fleda, who hadn't a penny in the world nor anything nice at home, and
whose only treasure was her subtle mind, to hear this genuine English
lady, fresh and fair, young in the fifties, declare with gayety and
conviction that she was herself the greatest Jew who had ever tracked a
victim. Fleda, with her mother dead, hadn'