It was the same story over again, only this time the copy was of a canvas with which he was not familiar; and again he wondered how he was going to be able to tell her. She became conscious of his increasing gravity. “You don’t like them?” she asked at a venture. The only thing he liked in all that dusty-aired attic was the slender, stooping figure with its aura of repressed ardencies. But this, he knew, was not the time to say so. “How do you feel about them?” he countered, watching her as she turned toward him and absently rubbed her fingers together. It struck him at first as a movement of repudiation, but he remembered that it was merely an effort to remove the attic dust from her hands. “It’s hard to explain,” was her answer. “Some of them I dislike and some of them I can’t understand, and there are a few of them I almost hate.” “Why?” he asked. “I don’t think I could make it clear to you,” was all she said. He saw no light through the blind wall of his dilemma, and he could not quite see how the first move was to be made. So he asked, in a merciful effort at postponement: “What pictures were taken from this collection?” “My father took the ones he liked when he went away the last time. He took them all but one.” She had misunderstood him. “No; you spoke of your Aunt Georgina carrying some of them downstairs when she fell,” he reminded her. “What were they, besides the Bouguereau?” She met his glance courageously in the clear light that flooded them. “One was a copy of Manet’s _Breakfast on the Grass_ and the other was the _Olympe_.” He began to divine the demands he had made on her courage. “They were nudes?” “Yes,” she acknowledged. “And that was the reason they were removed?” he asked, smiling in spite of himself. “They hate everything like that.” He found it harder than ever to go on. So he said almost curtly: “Let’s see the Correggio.” She turned back to the stacked canvases. “Now the others,” he commanded, after he had confirmed his suspicions as to the larger canvas with the mendacious medallion on its tarnished frame. He went through them patiently, and the inspection left him more depressed than he could understand. Yet he was tired of equivocation. He felt that nothing was to be gained by any further deferment of the death sentence. “I’m afraid I have a very great disappointment for you,” he began as gently as he could. He watched her as she turned slowly away and stared at the stacked canvases and the strips of faded cotton littering the floor. He could detect no stirring of emotion on her face, and for a moment he thought she had failed to catch at the note of forewarning in his voice. “You mean they’re not so valuable—not so valuable in the matter of dollars and cents—as my Aunt Georgina has been led to believe they are?”