III
The large drawing-room was vacant. The blinds had been drawn to shut out the glare, and a soft coolness filled the room. In the dim light of half-opened shutters the massive furniture loomed large and dark, and from the wall huge paintings looked down mistily. Gilt frames gleamed vaguely in the cool gloom. Above the fireplace hung a large canvas, and out of its depths sombre, waiting eyes looked down upon the vacant room.
The door opened. An old woman had entered. She held in her hand a stout cane. She walked stiffly across to the window and threw back a shutter. The window opened into the soft greenness of a Munich garden. She stood for a minute looking into it. Then she came over to the fireplace and looked up to the pictured face. Her head nodded slowly.
"It must be," she muttered, "it must be. No one else could have done it. But four hundred years!"—she sighed softly. "Who can tell?"
Her glance wandered with a dissatisfied air to the other canvases. "I would give them all—all of them—twice over—to know—" She spoke under her breath as she hobbled stiffly to a huge chair.
The door swung softly back and forth behind a young girl who had entered. She came in lightly, looking down at a packet of papers in her hand.
The old woman started forward.
"What have ye found?" she demanded. She was leaning on the stout cane. She peered out of her cavernous eyes.
The girl crossed to the window and seated herself in the green light. Shadows of a climbing vine fell on her hair and shoulders as she bent over the papers in her hand. She opened one of them and ran her eye over it before she spoke.