It was bewilderment, more than elation, that showed on her face. He even detected a touch of incredulity there as she turned back to the mellow glow of light reflected from the canvas. “That sounds ridiculous, perhaps, but I know about such things. It has been my business to know. For instance, there was the Panshanger _Raphael_, sometimes spoken of as the Small Cowper _Madonna_, which Widener paid seven hundred thousand dollars for. And the same collector, when he bought Rembrandt’s _Mill_, paid a cool half million for it, just as he paid a half million for a Vandyke from the Cattaneo collection. And Huntington paid four hundred thousand dollars for Velasquez’s _Duke of Olivares_, and Frick paid the same amount for a Gainsborough portrait, and a quarter of a million for a small Rembrandt. And I could go on that way until you got tired listening to me. But that’s not the important thing. All you’ve got to do is look at it. You’d know——” He broke off with a sense of inadequacy. Then wakening to the extent to which he had overlooked her in his excitement, he linked his arm fraternally through hers as she stood studying the canvas. “Yes, it’s lovely,” she murmured, without responding to the pressure on her arm. She seemed suddenly small and fragile there under the shadow of his shoulder. “There’s only one thing in all the world lovelier,” he told her as he smiled down into her face, grown pitiful with its shadows of fatigue. “One thing lovelier?” she echoed absently, clinging to him with a touch of forlornness. That morning of tangled emotions had plainly been a little too much for her. “I mean you,” he said. She raised ardent eyes at that, flushing happily as she looked up into his troubled face. For his thoughts, even as he spoke, had gone pioneering off into the uncertain future. And he turned her jealously away from the glow of the canvas. “It mustn’t take you away from me,” he cried out, with a parade of self-pity. She smiled surrenderingly, at that, and still again looked up into his eyes with a gaze so shot through with incongruously mingled hunger and gratitude that he turned sharply and took her in his arms. She lay there passively, with her eyes half closed again. And he studied her, satisfied with the silence and her nearness. He was still studying her when the sharp clangor of a bell sounded from below stairs. She drew away from him with a stricken light in her eyes. The bell sounded again, more authoritatively, more angrily. “That’s Aunt Georgina,” she said, with a look of childishness creeping back into her face. “She keeps that bell beside her bed. It means she wants me.” He arrested her retreat, resenting the meekness which that summons had imposed upon her. “But what are we to do about this?” he demanded, with a gesture toward the Titian. “What is best to do?” she asked in a whisper. It took some time before he seemed able to answer that question.