She had not stood there long before a black speck at the end of the avenue expanded into a motor that was presently throbbing at the entrance.  Undine, at its approach, turned from the window, and as she moved down the gallery her glance rested on the great tapestries, with their ineffable minglings of blue and rose, as complacently as though they had been mirrors reflecting her own image.

She was still looking at them when the door opened and a servant ushered in a small swarthy man who, in spite of his conspicuously London-made clothes, had an odd exotic air, as if he had worn rings in his ears or left a bale of spices at the door.

He bowed to Undine, cast a rapid eye up and down the room, and then, with his back to the windows, stood intensely contemplating the wall that faced them.

Undine’s heart was beating excitedly.  She knew the old Marquise was taking her afternoon nap in her room, yet each sound in the silent house seemed to be that of her heels on the stairs.

“Ah—­” said the visitor.

He had begun to pace slowly down the gallery, keeping his face to the tapestries, like an actor playing to the footlights.

“Ah—­” he said again.

To ease the tension of her nerves Undine began:  “They were given by Louis the Fifteenth to the Marquis de Chelles who—­”

“Their history has been published,” the visitor briefly interposed; and she coloured at her blunder.

The swarthy stranger, fitting a pair of eye-glasses to a nose that was like an instrument of precision, had begun a closer and more detailed inspection of the tapestries.  He seemed totally unmindful of her presence, and his air of lofty indifference was beginning to make her wish she had not sent for him.  His manner in Paris had been so different!

Suddenly he turned and took off the glasses, which sprang back into a fold of his clothing like retracted feelers.

“Yes.”  He stood and looked at her without seeing her.  “Very well.  I have brought down a gentleman.”

“A gentleman—?”

“The greatest American collector—­he buys only the best.  He will not be long in Paris, and it was his only chance of coming down.”

Undine drew herself up.  “I don’t understand—­I never said the tapestries were for sale.”

“Precisely.  But this gentleman buys only this that are not for sale.”

It sounded dazzling and she wavered.  “I don’t know—­you were only to put a price on them—­”

“Let me see him look at them first; then I’ll put a price on them,” he chuckled; and without waiting for her answer he went to the door and opened it.  The gesture revealed the fur-coated back of a gentleman who stood at the opposite end of the hall examining the bust of a seventeenth century field-marshal.

The dealer addressed the back respectfully.  “Mr. Moffatt!”

Moffatt, who appeared to be interested in the bust, glanced over his shoulder without moving.  “See here—­”