“I’m afraid I have a very great disappointment for you,” he began as gently as he could.
He watched her as she turned slowly away and stared at the stacked canvases and the strips of faded cotton littering the floor. He could detect no stirring of emotion on her face, and for a moment he thought she had failed to catch at the note of forewarning in his voice.
“You mean they’re not so valuable—not so valuable in the matter of dollars and cents—as my Aunt Georgina has been led to believe they are?”
“I’m sorry,” said Conkling, “but the two Constables are only copies, and there’s no chance of being mistaken when I say the Holbein is a palpable forgery. The Correggio is not even worth considering. It impresses me as a gallery student’s sketch—the sort of thing they used to sell to tourists by the mile. Strictly speaking, it has no commercial value. As for the others—well, candidly, I’m afraid it would scarcely pay you to put them in an agent’s hands. They’re not the character of work a city dealer could handle—could handle with any degree of profit to you and your aunts, I mean.”
She studied his face with her questioning, grave eyes.
“I was afraid so,” she finally said, with a new listlessness in her voice.
“I know it hurts,” he said, moving toward her, “and I’m sorry.”
“Sorry for what?” she asked with no reciprocal movement.
“That instead of bringing you happiness at the very first I’ve only been able to bring you the other thing.”
“I wasn’t thinking about myself,” she told him. “I was thinking more about them.”