"Very well, then," she said, after a while, "I'll tell you all I can. I don't know when the picture was shipped from Europe but I do know that a case addressed to Mr. Charles B. Tupper and marked 'valuable picture with great care' was delivered at our house in New York on July eighteenth. I can't mistake the date because Mr. Tupper was already very ill when the case arrived and he died two days later, that is on July twentieth, 1919. That you can ascertain easily enough, can't you?" Lady Polchester added tartly. Then as Purley offered no comment she went on more quietly: "That's all right, then. Now let me tell you that the case containing this picture was in my house two days before Mr. Tupper died, and that I never had it undone until a couple of months ago, here in this house. I had it shipped from New York, not along with all my things, but by itself; and there is the lawyer over there, Mr. George F. Topham, who can tell you all about the case. I was too upset what with Mr. Tupper's illness and then his death, and the will and the whole bag of tricks to trouble much about it myself, but I told the lawyer that it contained a picture for which Mr. Tupper had paid half a million dollars, and it was put down for probate for that amount; the lawyer took charge of the old thing, and he can swear, and lots of other people over in the States can swear that the case was never undone. And the shipping company can swear that it never was touched whilst it was in their charge. They delivered it here and their men opened the case for us and helped us to place the picture. "And now," concluded Lady Polchester, not because she had nothing more to say but presumably because she was out of breath, "now perhaps you'll tell me how a picture which was over in New York on the eighteenth of July can have been stolen from France on the twenty-fifth; and if you can't tell me that, then I'll trouble you to clear out of my house, for I've no use for Nosey Parkers about the place." The unfortunate Purley had certainly, by all accounts, rather a rough time of it with the lady. Nor could he arrive at any satisfactory arrangement with her. Needless to say that she absolutely refused to give up the picture unless she were forced to do so by law, and even then, she dared say, she could make it very unpleasant for some people. §3 The next event of any importance in this extraordinary case was the action brought by the Duc and Duchesse de Rochechouart here in England against Lady Polchester for illegal detention of their property. It very soon transpired that several witnesses had come over from the States in order to corroborate tie lady's assertions with regard to her rightful ownership of the picture, and the public was once more on the tiptoe of expectation.