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."