“That would be impossible to-day,” she told him with something oddly akin to terror in the eyes which evaded his. “Why not to-day?” he asked, intent on his study of her mysterious abashment. “They will have to be prepared,” she replied, ill at ease. “What do you mean by prepared?” “They will have to be cleaned, for one thing.” “And how do you propose cleaning them?” he demanded. “I have always regarded coal oil and turpentine as quite satisfactory,” she retorted, plainly resenting his tone. “Then if your canvases are of any value you’ve been using something which will very quickly take the value out of them. You’d kill their color in no time. We wash a picture with cheesecloth in warm water and soap, the same as you’d wash fine lace; and a part of the trick is to dry it quickly to keep it from warping. Then dissolve mastic tears in turpentine and put it on with a camel’s hair brush, if you have to.” It was plain that she was as averse to criticism as she was unaccustomed to it. “In that case perhaps the cleaning can be dispensed with,” she replied with dignity. “Then I suppose I can see ’em at once,” he suggested. But her embarrassment returned to her. “They will have to be arranged,” she said with a solemnity which in some way went lame. “How many canvases are there?” he asked. “Between twenty and thirty,” was the hesitating reply. Conkling showed his surprise. “It’ll take time, of course, to go over a bunch like that.” “That,” said Georgina Keswick with an air of escape, “is why I should prefer making an appointment for some other day.” “It all depends on the pictures, of course, just how long it’ll take me.” “I don’t think you’ll find them altogether trivial.” He recalled the earlier allusion to old masters. But he had had experience with the bucolic conception of such things. “Who are the artists?” he asked in his most matter-of-fact tone. “I’m not sure,” she said, after a moment’s hesitation. “At least, not sure of all of them.” “But the ones you know?” he prompted. And again a period of silence reigned in the shadowy room before she spoke. “There’s a Decamps and two Corots and a Holbein,” she said very quietly. “There is also a Constable—no, two Constables—and one Boldini, and what we were once led to believe was a copy of Correggio, though our late rector, who was in both Rome and Florence once, remained strongly persuaded that it was an original.” Conkling, as he sat staring at the faded face in the fading light, lost a little of his own color. It took his breath away. It was too much to believe. “That’s rather a formidable list,” he murmured weakly enough, for the whole thing still seemed incredible. Here, in the obscure corner of a Canadian colony, he was threatened with stumbling across a collection that might be the envy of a national gallery. They were claiming to have Corot and Correggio, Decamps and Holbein, housed in this decrepid old homestead hidden away in its ruinous old garden.