William sighed heavily. He seemed almost upon the verge of tears. June simply loathed the part she was playing. The only consolation was that she was acting quite as much in his interest as in her own.
Uncle Si came in shortly before eight. He sat down to supper in quite a good humour. For once the old man was in high conversational feather.
It was clear that his mind was still full of the picture. Without subscribing for one moment to William’s preposterous theory that the thing was a genuine Van Roon, he had had a further talk on the matter with his friend, Mr. Thornton, with whom he had travelled down to Newbury; and, he had arranged with that gentleman to bring his friend, Monsieur Duponnet, the famous Paris expert who was now in London, to come and look at it on Thursday afternoon. Monsieur Duponnet who knew more about Van Roon than anybody living, and had had several pass through his hands in the last ten years, would be able to say positively whether William was wrong, and S. Gedge Antiques was right, or with a devout gesture for which June longed to pull his ugly nose, vice versâ.
The time had now come for June to show her hand. Very quietly indeed her bolt was launched. William had given the picture to her.
The old man simply stared at her.
It was clear, however, that his thoughts were running so hard upon M. Duponnet and the higher potentialities that just at first he was not able to grasp the significance of June’s bald statement.
So that there should be no doubt about the position June modestly repeated it.
“Given it to you!” said the old man, a light beginning to break. “How do you mean—given it to you?”
Calmly, patiently June threw a little more light on the subject. And while she did so her eyes were fixed with veiled defiance upon the face of Uncle Si. The thought uppermost in her mind was that he took it far better than could have been expected. “Given it to you,” he kept on saying to himself softly. There was no explosion. “Given it to you,” he kept on. He grew a little green about the gills and that was all.
At last he turned to William: “Boy, what’s this? Is the girl daft?” The mildness of tone was astonishing.