guests, and after a long silent pause, he smiled faintly into
his beard. "Let us go back to the fire," he said, and clicked them into
darkness again.

"And what do you say?" he asked as they sat down.

"By Jove!" cried the doctor. "By Jove!"

Madame Orloff turned on the collector the somber glow of her deep-set
eyes. "I have dreamed it," she said.

"It is real," said Vieyra. "You are the first to see it. I wished to
observe how----"

"It's an unknown Vermeer!" The doctor brought his big white hand down
loudly on this discovery. "Nobody but Vermeer could have done the plaster
wall in the sunlight. And the girl's strange gray head-dress must be
seventeenth-century Dutch of some province I don't----"

"I am a rich man, for a picture-dealer," said Vieyra, "but only national
governments can afford to buy Vermeers nowadays."

"But you picked it up from some corner, some attic, some stable----"

"Yes, I picked it up from a stable," said the collector.

The actress laid her slender, burning fingers on his cool old hand. "Tell
us--tell us," she urged. "There is something different here."

"Yes, there is something different," he stirred in his chair and thrust
out his lips. "So different that I don't know if you----"

"Try me! try me!" she assured him ardently. "You have educated me well to
your own hard standards all these years."

At this he looked at her, startled, frowning, attentive, and ended by
shaking off her hand. "No, I will not tell you."

"You shall----" her eyes commanded, adjured him. There was a silence. "I
will understand," she said under her breath.

"You will not understand," he said in the same tone; but aloud he began:
"I heard of it first from an American picture-dealer over here scraping up
a mock-Barbizon collection for a new millionaire. He wanted to get my
judgment, he said, on a canvas that had been brought to him by a cousin of
his children's governess. I was to be sure to see it when I went to New
York--you knew did you not, that I had been called to New York to testify
in the prosecution of Paullsen for selling a signed copy?"

"Did you really go?" asked the doctor. "I thought you swore that nothing
could take you to America."

"I went," said the old man grimly. "Paullsen did me a bad turn once,
thirty years ago. And while I was there I went to see the unknown canvas.
The dealer half apologized for taking my time--said he did not as a rule
pay any attention to freak things brought in