“Süsslein didn’t say any more. He left me there. He seemed a changed man. And I took the ikon home. As I told Süsslein, I had it all planned out where I was going to hang it in the little space between the panels over the desk in my boudoir. “This morning, before I was up, Süsslein was round at the house. He said he wanted to speak to me urgently. He had come, he told me, on behalf of a client to offer me a thousand pounds for the ikon. I told him I wasn’t selling. He asked me what I would take. I told him I didn’t intend to part with my treasure. “‘My client,’ he said, ‘is most anxious, for family reasons, to acquire the ikon,’ and he offered me two thousand guineas, and then three. “By this time I was getting pretty peeved, and I told Süsslein so. ‘If your client can prove to my satisfaction,’ I told him, ‘that this ikon really is an heirloom in his family, it’s a different matter. At present it looks to me as though you and he had realized too late that I had got on to something pretty good. I’m not selling, and you can tell your client so!’ And with that I sent him about his business. “I had a lot of trouble to get rid of him. Like so many dealers, he seemed to think it was all a question of money. He couldn’t realize that I’d never part with anything that went so well with the dull green wainscot of my boudoir unless, of course, they could prove to me that the ikon had been stolen or something of that kind.” “Your dealer pal didn’t tell you the name of his client?” asked Desmond. “I asked him, of course, but he said he was not at liberty to reveal it. But it didn’t matter any, for, about an hour later, he arrived in person.” “The client?” “Sure. A Russian, a certain Dr. Madjaroff. I was sick and tired of the whole thing, so I told the butler to say I was busy. But he said he’d wait till I was disengaged. So, just to get rid of him, I saw him. My dear, he was the most extraordinary-looking person, a vast man with a great bushy black beard and a clubfoot . . .” There was a crash from the fender. Desmond Okewood had suddenly dropped the knee he had been hugging and overset the fire irons. “He spoke in French,” Patricia Maxwell went on. “He said that, through a misunderstanding, Monsieur Saumergue, who had been bidding for him at Blackie’s yesterday, had failed to secure the ikon. ‘But,’ he said, ‘I am prepared to pay handsomely for the mistake. I will now write you my cheque for three thousand five hundred guineas!’ And he actually produced a cheque-book and a fountain pen! “I told him I didn’t want to sell. But do you think he’d take ‘no’ for an answer? Not on your life! ‘Would I name my own figure?’ he said, and when I stood up and repeated that I meant to keep the ikon and that he was wasting his time, he offered me first five thousand guineas and at last, by stages, six thousand five hundred.