His bewildered eye rested for a moment on the Tanagra figurines. Yet they only added to his disturbance, for the man who had captured them, he knew, had been a good picker; and nothing, after all, was too preposterous for such a house. “When shall I come back?” he asked, with rather an anxious face. “Will to-morrow at two be convenient?” he heard his hostess in rusty black inquiring. “I’ll be here at two,” he said with a belated effort at professional impersonality. But it was an abortive effort, for he had become too actively conscious that he stood on the threshold of some high adventure. And so sharp was that inner excitement that he even forgot about Julia Keswick until he saw her rose shears hanging on a cedar twig near the broken gate. CHAPTER FOUR Conkling, on returning to the Keswick house for the second time, nursed an elusive sense of frustration. He nursed, as well, a sense of playing little more than a secondary rôle in a drama of deferment. For the accessories of the drama were not arranging themselves as he might have wished. On his way back to the manor-house he had come face to face with Lavinia Keswick, and that austere old figure, seated in a decrepid canopied phaëton drawn by a rawboned mare, had either failed or refused to recognize him. He was further depressed by the ominous silence which reigned when he pounded on the faded manor-door with the heavy brass knocker in the form of an ape with laughter on its embittered metal face. But in a minute or two the door was opened, and Julia Keswick herself stood confronting him. She was dressed in Quaker gray, and seemed more repressed and more mature than when he had first caught sight of her. But she had the power, for all her quietness, of once more making his pulse skip a beat or two. “I was to look over the pictures,” he explained, noticing her hesitancy. “I’m afraid that won’t be possible to-day,” she told him in a tone of constraint. “But your aunt asked me to,” he reminded her. “I know, but there has been an accident.” “A serious one?” he asked. “I hope not. But my Aunt Georgina slipped on the attic steps and sprained her ankle. It’s paining her a great deal, and she has gone to bed.” “Could I possibly see her?” A ghost of a smile appeared on the girl’s face. It would not be easy to explain to him that no living man had ever beheld her Aunt Georgina in bed. So she merely shook her head. “Then how about your Aunt Lavinia?” Again the girl shook her head. “She has had to go to Weston to see a lawyer about a mortgage foreclosure—and she has always hated the pictures.” “Then why couldn’t you show them to me?” he suggested. “I don’t think my aunt would approve of that.” “But in an emergency like this?” he contended.