He did not, in fact, seem to remember anything in particular, but went on quite naturally for some minutes. He had replaced Horace on the shelf and was on the point of taking another book when he paused, as if recalling something else.
“Weren’t we going to see the picture-gallery?” he inquired. “Isn’t it getting late? I should like to see the portraits.”
“No hurry,” answered T. Tembarom. “I was just waiting till you were ready. But we’ll go right away, if you like.”
They went without further ceremony. As they walked through the hall and down the corridors side by side, an imaginative person might have felt that perhaps the eyes of an ancient, darkling portrait or so looked down at the pair curiously: the long, loosely built New Yorker rather slouching along by the soldierly almost romantic figure which in a measure suggested that others not unlike it might have trod the same oaken floor, wearing ruff and doublet, or lace jabot and sword. There was a far cry between the two, but they walked closely in friendly union. When they entered the picture-gallery, Strangeways paused a moment again, and stood peering down its length.
“It is very dimly lighted. How can we see?” he said.
“I told Pearson to leave it dim,” Tembarom answered.
He tried, and succeeded tolerably well, to say it casually as he led the way ahead of them. He and the duke had not talked the scheme over for nothing. As his grace had said, they had “worked the thing up.” As they moved down the gallery, the men and women in their frames looked like ghosts staring out to see what was about to happen.
“We’ll turn up the lights after a while,” T. Tembarom explained still casually. “There’s a picture here I think a good deal of. I’ve stood and looked at it pretty often. It reminded me of someone the first day I set eyes on it; but it was quite a time before I made up my mind who it was. It used to drive me half dotty trying to think it out.”
“Which one?” asked Strangeways.