Page:Arthur Stringer - Twin Tales.djvu/279

Rh "You needn't worry," he told her, though he smiled the next moment at the inadequacy of his phrasing. "That canvas is a Titian. There's not a shadow of doubt about it. There's no chance of a mistake. No copyist could ever turn the trick like that—not in a thousand years! The only thing that leaves me stumped is how it ever got here." "I've never been told about it, of course," she explained, with a slight tremolo of excitement in her voice. "I don't think there was anybody to tell about it after my father died. But in a letter to a French artist named Branchaud, which must have been returned undelivered after he went to Italy for the last time and was among his papers, father wrote that he'd live on acorns and sleep in a dog kennel before he'd part with the T. 'T,' I remember, was all he had written. He said it had cost him too much—too much in blood and tears and worry and work. There was something about a monk at Parma, a monk who had sinned against both God and man, as the letter put it, to whom father had