"Wait a bit. Where's the Raeburn?"
"'Highland Mary'? Sold. A pork butcher in America bought her for a fabulous sum. I believe Dick Manvers lost the whole of it on one race. If there is coin in the next world, he will play ducks and drakes with it upon the glassy sea."
"Sold! Good God!" said his nephew, staring horrorstruck at his uncle. "How awful! Pictures ought not to belong to individuals. The nation ought to have them." He seemed staggered. "Awful!" he said again. "What a tragedy!"
"To my mind, that is more tragic," said Mr. Stirling bluntly, pointing to the window.
In the deserted garden, near the sundial, Janey was standing, a small nondescript figure in a mushroom hat, picking snap-dragons. The gardens had been allowed to run wild for lack of funds to keep them in order, and had become beautiful exceedingly in consequence. The rose-coloured snap-dragons and amber lupins were struggling to hold their own in their stone-edged beds against an invasion of willow weed. A convolvulus had climbed to the sundial, wrapping it round and round, and had laid its bold white trumpet flowers on the leaded disk itself. Janey had not disturbed it. Perhaps she thought that no one but herself sought to see the time there. The snap-dragons rose in a great blot of straggling rose and white and wine-red round her feet. She was picking them slowly, as one whose mind was not following her hand. At a little distance Harry was lying at his full length on the flags beside the round stone-edged fountain, blowing assiduously at a little boat which was refusing to cross. In the midst of the water Cellini's world-famed water nymph reined in her dolphins.
A yellow stone-crop had found a foothold on the pedestal of the group, and flaunted its raw gold in the vivid sunshine amid the weather-bitten grey stone, making a fantastic broken reflection where Harry's boat rippled the water. And behind Janey's figure, and behind the reflection of the fountain in the water, was the cool, sinister background of the circular yew hedge, with the heather pink of the willow weed crowding up against it.
The young man gasped.
"But it's—it's a picture," he said. And then, after a moment, he added, "Everything except the woman. Of course she won't do."
Geoff's curiously innocent prominent eyes were fixed. His vacant face was rapt. His uncle looked sympathetically at him. He knew what it was to receive an idea "like Dian's kiss, unasked, unsought."