“No,” she repeated, in the most matter-of-fact tone, “I should say nothing, in your place.  I should forget it.”

“You would?” He drummed on the table.

“I should!  And whatever you do, don’t worry.”  Her accents were the coaxing accents of a nurse with a child—­or with a lunatic.

He perceived now with the utmost clearness that she did not believe a word of what he had said, and that in her magnificent and calm sagacity she was only trying to humour him.  He had expected to disturb her soul to its profoundest depths; he had expected that they would sit up half the night discussing the situation.  And lo!—­“I should forget it,” indulgently!  And a mild continuance of darning!

He had to think, and think hard.

Tears

“Henry,” she called out the next morning, as he disappeared up the stairs.  “What are you doing up there?”

She had behaved exactly as if nothing had happened; and she was one of those women whose prudent policy it is to let their men alone even to the furthest limit of patience; but she had nerves, too, and they were being affected.  For three days Henry had really been too mysterious!

He stopped, and put his head over the banisters, and in a queer, moved voice answered: 

“Come and see.”

Sooner or later she must see.  Sooner or later the already distended situation must get more and more distended until it burst with a loud report.  Let the moment be sooner, he swiftly decided.

So she went and saw.

Half-way up the attic stairs she began to sniff, and as he turned the knob of the attic door for her she said, “What a smell of paint!  I fancied yesterday——­”

If she had been clever enough she would have said, “What a smell of masterpieces!” But her cleverness lay in other fields.

“You surely haven’t been aspinalling that bath-room chair?...  Oh!”

This loud exclamation escaped from her as she entered the attic and saw the back of the picture which Priam had lodged on the said bath-room chair—­filched by him from the bath-room on the previous day.  She stepped to the vicinity of the window and obtained a good view of the picture.  It was brilliantly shining in the light of morn.  It looked glorious; it was a fit companion of many pictures from the same hand distributed among European galleries.  It had that priceless quality, at once noble and radiant, which distinguished all Priam’s work.  It transformed the attic; and thousands of amateurs and students, from St. Petersburg to San Francisco, would have gone into that attic with their hats off and a thrill in the spine, had they known what was there and had they been invited to enter and worship.  Priam himself was pleased; he was delighted; he was enthusiastic.  And he stood near the picture, glancing at it and then glancing at Alice, nervously, like a mother whose sister-in-law has come to look at the baby.  As for Alice, she said nothing.  She had first of all to take in the fact that her husband had been ungenerous enough to keep her quite in the dark as to the nature of his secret activities; then she had to take in the fact of the picture.