The small old Jew drew a long breath.  “Yes, I have something new.”  He hesitated, opened his lips, closed them again and, looking at the fire, “Oh yes, very new indeed—­new to me.”

“Is it here?” The great surgeon looked about the picture-covered walls.

“No; I have it in—­you know what you call the inner sanctuary—­the light here is not good enough.”

The actress stood up, her glittering dress flashing a thousand eyes at the fire.  “Let me see it,” she commanded.  “Certainly I would like to see anything that was new to you!”

“You shall amuse yourself by identifying the artist without my aid,” said old Vieyra.

He opened a door, held back a portiere, let his guests pass through into a darkened room, turned on a softly brilliant light, and:  “Whom do you make the artist?” he said.  He did not look at the picture.  He looked at the faces of his guests, and after a long silent pause, he smiled faintly into his beard.  “Let us go back to the fire,” he said, and clicked them into darkness again.

“And what do you say?” he asked as they sat down.

“By Jove!” cried the doctor.  “By Jove!”

Madame Orloff turned on the collector the somber glow of her deep-set eyes.  “I have dreamed it,” she said.

“It is real,” said Vieyra.  “You are the first to see it.  I wished to observe how——­”

“It’s an unknown Vermeer!” The doctor brought his big white hand down loudly on this discovery.  “Nobody but Vermeer could have done the plaster wall in the sunlight.  And the girl’s strange gray head-dress must be seventeenth-century Dutch of some province I don’t——­”

“I am a rich man, for a picture-dealer,” said Vieyra, “but only national governments can afford to buy Vermeers nowadays.”

“But you picked it up from some corner, some attic, some stable——­”

“Yes, I picked it up from a stable,” said the collector.

The actress laid her slender, burning fingers on his cool old hand.  “Tell us—­tell us,” she urged.  “There is something different here.”

“Yes, there is something different,” he stirred in his chair and thrust out his lips.  “So different that I don’t know if you——­”

“Try me! try me!” she assured him ardently.  “You have educated me well to your own hard standards all these years.”

At this he looked at her, startled, frowning, attentive, and ended by shaking off her hand.  “No, I will not tell you.”

“You shall——­” her eyes commanded, adjured him.  There was a silence.  “I will understand,” she said under her breath.

“You will not understand,” he said in the same tone; but aloud he began:  “I heard of it first from an American picture-dealer over here scraping up a mock-Barbizon collection for a new millionaire.  He wanted to get my judgment, he said, on a canvas that had been brought to him by a cousin of his children’s governess.  I was to be sure to see it when I went to New York—­you knew did you not, that I had been called to New York to testify in the prosecution of Paullsen for selling a signed copy?”