Chapter 41 - Page 2

then,
with his back to the windows, stood intensely contemplating the wall
that faced them.

Undine's heart was beating excitedly. She knew the old Marquise was
taking her afternoon nap in her room, yet each sound in the silent house
seemed to be that of her heels on the stairs.

"Ah--" said the visitor.

He had begun to pace slowly down the gallery, keeping his face to the
tapestries, like an actor playing to the footlights.

"AH--" he said again.

To ease the tension of her nerves Undine began: "They were given by
Louis the Fifteenth to the Marquis de Chelles who--"

"Their history has been published," the visitor briefly interposed; and
she coloured at her blunder.

The swarthy stranger, fitting a pair of eye-glasses to a nose that was
like an instrument of precision, had begun a closer and more detailed
inspection of the tapestries. He seemed totally unmindful of her
presence, and his air of lofty indifference was beginning to make
her wish she had not sent for him. His manner in Paris had been so
different!

Suddenly he turned and took off the glasses, which sprang back into a
fold of his clothing like retracted feelers.

"Yes." He stood and looked at her without seeing her. "Very well. I have
brought down a gentleman."

"A gentleman--?"

"The greatest American collector--he buys only the best. He will not be
long in Paris, and it was his only chance of coming down."

Undine drew herself up. "I don't understand--I never said the tapestries
were for sale."

"Precisely. But this gentleman buys only this that are not for sale."

It sounded dazzling and she wavered. "I don't know--you were only to put
a price on them--"

"Let me see him look at them first; then I'll put a price on them," he
chuckled; and without waiting for her answer he went to the door and
opened it. The gesture revealed the fur-coated back of a gentleman
who stood at the opposite end of the hall examining the bust of a
seventeenth century field-marshal.

The dealer addressed the back respectfully. "Mr. Moffatt!"

Moffatt, who appeared to be interested in the bust, glanced over his
shoulder without moving. "See here--"

His glance took in Undine, widened to astonishment and passed into
apostrophe. "Well, if this ain't the damnedest--!" He came forward and
took her by both hands. "Why, what on earth are you doing down here?"

She laughed and blushed, in a tremor at the odd turn of the adventure.
"I live here. Didn't you know?"

"Not a word--never thought of asking