Page:Dorothy Canfield--Hillsboro People.djvu/279

 "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