The frenzy did not endure long. A thing trifling in itself was sufficient to restore the dealer to full possession of his senses. The sergeant of police who had accompanied him into the room had pulled out his note book in readiness to make notes of the occurrence, when a clock on the mantel-shelf struck four. At the sound, Flurscheim became still.
"Four o'clock," he murmured. "Four o'clock. There's no time to lose. We must be doing." He turned to the policeman. "Sergeant," he said dejectedly, "I shall trust you to forget the exhibition I have made of myself—I——"
The sergeant answered briskly. "Very natural, I'm sure, sir. Should have felt just like it myself, though I must admit I've put the bracelets on many a man who hasn't said half as much as you have done—of course, in the public streets, sir."
There was a sickly smile on Flurscheim's face as he answered: "I hope none of them had such good reason for cursing as I have."
He did not pursue the topic. With an effort he forced his mind from contemplation of the loss. "Hadn't we better leave things in this room untouched, while we search the rest of the house? There may be some one of the burglars, if there was more than one, still on the premises."
The sergeant agreed. But the search was a fruitless one. Mr. Flurscheim's butler and his four women servants were the only other persons found on the premises, and after their unsuccessful search the uniformed members of the force withdrew and the dealer sat down to await the arrival of the detective with what patience he could summon to his aid.
It was the bitterest moment in Flurscheim's career. Despite Lynton Hora's sneer, it was not the monetary value of his loss which troubled him, for though he dealt in pictures and other art objects, yet he never parted with any of his treasures without a poignant feeling of regret. When he sold them, however, he knew that they would pass into appreciative hands, that they would be guarded carefully and preserved jealously. To him they were what horses are to one man or dogs to another. They were his companions, his friends, his children—and to have the chief of them ruthlessly cut from its frame and carried away, he knew not where, was as if his household had been robbed of an only child.
He gazed forlornly at the empty frame. Since the Greuze had come into his possession, never a night had passed without his taking a last glance at it before going upstairs to bed, never a morning dawned but he had feasted his eyes upon it before sitting down to his breakfast. To live alone without the Greuze seemed to him an unthinkable existence.
Yet the frame was empty. There took root in his heart a desire for revenge upon the man who had robbed him.
That thought matured in the days which followed—the days which came swiftly and passed swiftly, but without bringing him any trace of his treasure, days in which the detectives continually buoyed him up with hopes that his picture was on the ace of being restored to him.