Peter looked at them, then swiftly up at Lord Evelyn, who swayed at his side, his glass screwed into one smiling eye. Lord Evelyn touched the near statuette with his light, unsteady, beautifully-ringed hand. "Rather lovely, isn't she," he said, caressing her. "We found her and the Actaeon in a dusty hole of a place in a miserable little _calle_ off the Campo delle Beccarie, kept by a German Jew. Quite a find, the old sinner. What an extortioner, though! Eh, Margerison? How much has the old Schneller got out of my pocket? It was your brother who discovered him for me, young Peter. He took me there, and we found the Diana together. Like her? Giacomo Treviso, a pupil of Verrocchio's. Heard of him? The Actaeon's not so good now. Same man, but not so happy." He turned the Diana about; he posed her for Peter's edification. Peter looked from her to the Actaeon, from the Actaeon to Lord Evelyn's face. He opened his lips to say something, and closed them on silence. He looked past Lord Evelyn to Hilary, who stood in the background, leaning a little against a chair. It seemed to Peter that there was a certain tensity, a strain, in his face. Then Peter met full the bright, hard, vivid gaze of the alert Cheriton. It had an odd expression at this moment; unmistakably inimical, observantly curious, distinctly sardonic. A faint ironic smile just touched the corners of his determined mouth. Peter returned the look with his puzzled, enquiring eyes that sought to understand. This much, anyhow, he seemed to understand: his role was silence. If Cheriton didn't speak (and Cheriton's expression showed that he knew) and if Hilary didn't speak ... well, he, Peter, couldn't speak either. He must acquiesce in what appeared to be a conspiracy to keep this pathetic, worn-out dilettante in a fool's paradise. The pathos of it gripped Peter's heart. Lord Evelyn had once known so well. What havoc was this that one could apparently make of one's faculties? It wasn't only physical semi-blindness; it was a blindness of the mind, a paralysis of the powers of discrimination and appreciation, which, was pitiful. Peter was angry. He thought Hilary and Cheriton so abominably, unmitigatedly wrong. And yet he himself had said, "If it makes them happy"--and left that as the indubitable end. Ah, but one didn't lie to people, even for that. Peter was brought up sharply, as he had often been before, against Hilary's strange Hilaryish, perverted views of the conduct of life's businesses. Then, as usual when he should have felt furthest from mirth, he abruptly collapsed into sudden helpless laughter. Lord Evelyn turned the eye-glass on him. "Eh?" he queried. "Why so? But never mind; you always suffered in that way, I remember. Get it from your mother, I think; she did, too. Never explain jokes; they lose so in the telling. Now I want to show you something over here."