He took the picture out of its brown paper wrapping and looked at it closely under the light. The glass was cracked and dirty, and the frame was falling apart and tied up with wire; but the result of his inspection gave him a sudden shock. The print was a discovery—if he knew anything at all about these things, it was worth at least five hundred pounds. Mr. Winlass frowned at it disparagingly.
'A fairly good specimen of a rather common plate,' he said carelessly. 'I should think it would fetch about ten pounds.'
Captain Tombs looked surprised.
'Is that all?' he grumbled. 'The fellow at Busby's told me I ought to get anything from three hundred up for it.'
'Ah-hum,' said Mr. Winlass dubiously. He peered at the print again, and raised his eyes from it in an elaborate rendering of delight. 'By Jove,' he exclaimed, 'I believe you're right. Tricky things, these prints. If you hadn't told me that, I might have missed it altogether. But it looks as if—if it is a genuine. . . . Well!' said Mr. Winlass expansively, 'I almost think I'll take a chance on it. How about two hundred and fifty?'
'But the fellow at Busby's——'
'Yes, yes,' said Mr. Winlass testily. 'But these are not good times for selling this sort of thing. People haven't got the money to spend. Besides, if you wanted to get a price like that, you'd have to get the picture cleaned up—get experts to certify it—all kinds of things like that. And they all cost money. And when you'd done them all, it mightn't prove to be worth anything. I'm offering to take a gamble on it and save you a lot of trouble and expense.'
Captain Tombs hesitated; and Mr. Winlass pulled out a cheque-book and unscrewed his fountain-pen.
'Come, now,' he urged genially. 'I believe in Getting Things Done. Make up your mind, my dear chap. Suppose we split it at two-seventy-five—or two hundred and eighty——'
'Make it two hundred and eighty-five,' said Captain Tombs reluctantly, 'and I suppose I'd better let it go.'
Mr. Winlass signed the cheque with the nearest approach to glee that he would ever be able to achieve while parting with money in any quantity; and he knew that he was getting the print for half its value. When Captain Tombs had gone, he set it up against the inkwell and fairly gloated over it. A moment later he picked up a heavy paperknife and attacked it with every evidence of ferocity.
But the scowl of pained indignation which darkened his brow was directed solely against the cracked glass and the dilapidated frame. The picture was his new-born babe, his latest ewe lamb; and it was almost inevitable that he should rise against the vandal disfigurement of its shabby trappings as a fond mother would rise in wrath against the throwing of mud pies at her beloved offspring. With the horrible cradle that had sheltered it stripped away and cast into the wastebasket, he set up the print again and gloated over it from every angle. After a long time he turned it over to stow it safely in an envelope—and it was when he did this that he noticed the writing on the back.
The reactions of an equally inevitable curiosity made him carry the picture over to the window to read the almost indecipherable scrawl. The ink was rusty with age, the spidery hand angular and old-fashioned, but after some study he was able to make out the words.
None of the members of Mr. Winlass's staff, some of whom had been with him through ten years of his hard-headed and dignified career, could remember any previous occasion when he had erupted from his office with so much violence. The big limousine which wafted him to Turk's Lane could not travel fast enough for him: he shuffled from one side of the seat to the other, craning forward to look for impossible gaps in the traffic, and emitting short nasal wuffs of almost canine impatience.
Dave Roberts was not in the little shop when Mr. Winlass walked in. A
