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 the knife to rest in the wound. "It's an immensely valuable collection. You see, I know about it because I used to see Cousin Horace every winter when I went to Rome. I knew more about him than any of you. He was a man of perfect taste in such things. He really knew."

Olivia sat all the while watching the scene with a quiet amusement. The triumph on this occasion was clearly Sabine's, and Sabine knew it. She sat there enjoying every moment of it, watching Aunt Cassie writhe at the thought of so valuable a heritage going out of the direct family, to so remote and hostile a connection. It was clearly a disaster ranking in importance with the historic loss of Savina Pentland's parure of pearls and emeralds at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. It was property lost forever that should have gone into the family fortune.

Sabine was opening the letter slowly, allowing the paper to crackle ominously, as if she knew that every crackle ran painfully up and down the spine of the old lady.

"It's the invoice from the Custom House," she said, lifting each of the five long sheets separately. "Five pages long . . . total value perhaps as much as seventy-five thousand dollars. . . . Of course there's not even any duty to pay, as they're all old things."

Aunt Cassie started, as if seized by a sudden pain, and Sabine continued, "He even left provision for shipping it . . . all save four or five big pieces which are being held at Mentone. There are eighteen cases in all."

She began to read the items one by one. . . cabinets, commodes, chairs, lusters, tables, pictures, bits of bronze, crystal and jade. . . all the long list of things which Horace Pentland had gathered with the loving care of a connoisseur during the long years of his exile; and in the midst of the reading, Aunt Cassie, unable any longer to control herself, interrupted, saying, "It seems to me he was an ungrateful,