“I want a check for a hundred pounds and a third of the thing when you bring it out.”
Hecklemeir stood for a moment with the tips of his fingers pressed against his lips; then replied.
“If you have anything like the thing you describe, I'll give you a hundred pounds... let me see it.”
She took the water color out of the bosom of her jacket and gave it to him.
He carried it over to the window and studied it a moment. Then he turned with a sneering oath.
“The devil take your treasure,” he said, “these things are water-elephants. I don't care a farthing if they stand on the bottom of every lake in Africa!”
And he flung the water color toward her. Mechanically the stunned woman picked it up and smoothed it out in her fingers.
With the key to the picture she saw it clearly, the shadowy bodies of the beasts and the tips of their trunks distended on the surface like a purple flower. And vaguely, as though it were a memory from a distant life, she recalled hearing the French Ambassador and Baron Rudd discussing the report of an explorer who pretended to have seen these supposed fabulous elephants come out of an African forest and go down under the waters of Lake Leopold.
She stood there a moment, breaking the thing into pieces with her bare hands. Then she went out. At the door on the landing she very nearly stepped against a little cockney.
“My Lidy,” he whined, “I was bringing your gloves; you dropped them on your way up.”