"How dared they come and ask her such impertinent questions?" she stormed. "Did they imagine she had stolen a beastly picture which she would as soon throw on the dust heap as look at again? She, who could buy up all the pictures in any gallery and not feel the pinch..." and so on and so on. The unfortunate Purley had a very unpleasant quarter of an hour, but after a while he succeeded in pacifying the irate lady and got her to listen calmly to what he had to say. He managed to make her understand that without casting the slightest aspersion upon her honourability or that of the late Charles B. Tupper, there was no getting away from the fact that the picture now hanging in the library of Holt Manor was the property of the Duc de Rochechouart from whose house in France it was stolen over two years before--to be quite accurate it was stolen on July twenty-fifth, 1919. "Then," retorted the lady, by no means convinced or mollified, "I can prove you all to be liars, for the late Mr. Charles B. Tupper bought the old thing long before that. He had been on the Continent in the spring of 1919 and landed in New York again on May eighteenth. He told me then that he had made some interesting purchases in Europe, amongst them there was a picture for which he had paid half a million dollars. I scolded him about it, as I thought he was throwing his money away on such stuff, but he said that he wanted to make use of the picture for some wonderful advertising scheme he had in his mind, so I said no more about it. But that is the picture you say was stolen from some duke or other in July, when I tell you that it had been shipped for New York a month at least before that." Perhaps at this point Detective Purley failed to conceal altogether a slight look of incredulity, for Lady Polchester turned on him once more like a fury. "So you still think I stole the dirty old picture, do you?" she cried, using further language that is quite unprintable, "and you think that I am such a ninny and that I will give it up simply because you are trying to bully me. But I won't, so there! I can prove the truth of every word I say, and I don't care if I have to spend another million dollars to put your old duke in prison for talking such rot about me." Once again Purley's tact had to come into play, and after a while he succeeded in soothing the lady's outraged feelings. With infinite patience he gradually got her to view the matter more calmly and above all not to look upon him as an enemy, but as a friend whose one desire was to throw light upon what certainly seemed an extraordinary mystery.