Page:The Outcry (London, Methuen & Co., 1911).djvu/132

118 "So Mr. Bender says!" he laughed. "You've got five or six"

"Only five or six?" she cried in bright alarm.

"'Only'?" he continued to laugh. "Why, that's enormous, five or six things of the first importance! But I think I ought to mention to you," he added, "a most barefaced 'Rubens' there in the library."

"It isn't a Rubens?"

"No more than I'm a Ruskin."

"Then you'll brand us—expose us for it?"

"No, I'll let you off—I'll be quiet if you're good, if you go straight. I'll only hold it in terrorem. One can't be sure in these dreadful days—that's always to remember; so that if you're not good I'll come down on you with it. But to balance against that threat," he went on, "I've made the very grandest find. At least I believe I have!"

She was all there for this news. "Of the Mantovano—hidden in the other thing?"

Hugh wondered—almost as if she had been before him. "You don't mean to say you've had the idea of that?"

"No, but my father has told me."