"The picture? What picture?" cried Angelo, dropping Florrie's arm in his excitement, and hurrying to the side of the Baronet.
"Why yours! 'The Fall of Cæsar.'"
"Are you sure?" cried Angelo breathlessly.
"Quite. And it was hanging here last night, I will swear."
There was a deep and painful silence, followed by the usual commonplaces evoked by a surprise.
"Where can it have gone?" cried Angelo, his voice expressing the deepest concern. "Sir Hugh, I trust nothing has happened to that picture. Though yours in point of law, I still regard it to some extent as mine. I would never have parted with it, if I had thought it would be destroyed. My picture! my picture! Some one must have stolen it."
He sank down on a seat, and lifted his hand to his brow with a bewildered air, as if scarcely realising the situation.
"This is the work of an enemy," he murmured.
If his words were true, the enemy was certainly one who knew how to strike home. No mortification—not even Daphne's refusal of his love—could have been more bitter to the artist than the knowledge that his adored masterpiece was in the hands of an enemy capable of destroying it.
"Let all the servants be sent for," cried the Baronet. "What does all this mean? First it is a book that vanishes, then a picture."