“Exactly,” answered Hirsch. “My partner. He had almost completed negotiations for the loan of the cup for the purpose I have mentioned. But really there seems no need for us to be troubling Sir Gilbert. The cup will be back before his return from Edinburgh, and—”
“Just that!” said Meldrum dryly. “And what about my security?”
Delighted with such apparent pliability, Hirsch produced his English notes, which brought a very passion of greed to Meldrum’s eyes.
“Let us not be calling it security, Mr Meldrum,” he remarked insidiously. “If a hundred pounds—”
Again the guide ironically chuckled. “If I could trust ye for a hundred pounds, Mr Hirsch, I could trust ye mair for ten times that,” he said. “I take your word for’t that we needna ca’t security: if I’m to risk my job and my reputation, the cost of three weeks loan o’ that siller tankard is exactly a thousand pounds!”
. . . . .
Three weeks later, the Quair Cup and its duplicate came back from Tregastel of Paris, so much alike that Hirsch would have been beat to see a difference had it not been that he found on one a private microscopic mark he had put on it himself.
But it was not the cup so marked that he returned to the accommodating Meldrum.
Two months more, and the curio world was shaken once again by the intimation of another Tudor Cup for sale at Sotheby’s. Amongst the host of possible bidders who examined the precious piece of tarnished metal taken out impressively from Sotheby’s strongest safe some days before the sale, was Barraclough, the expert who had bought its fellow earlier in the season for his client in America.
“A brilliant forgery,” he exclaimed on careful scrutiny—“one of Jules Tregastel’s charming reproductions,” and departed.