No: he hadn't been rigged; at least, not by design. Something more than its
intrinsic value had rendered the canvas priceless in the esteem of those
two, something had been at stake more than mere possession of what they
might have believed to be a real Corot.

But what?

Perplexed, Lanyard took the picture in his hands--it was not too unwieldy,
even in its frame--and examined it with nose so close to the painted
surface that he seemed to be smelling it. Then he turned it over and
scowled at its reverse. And shook a baffled head.

But when he tapped the face of the picture smartly with a finger-nail, he
gave a slight start, passed a hand over it with the palm pressed flat, and
suddenly assumed the humanly intelligent expression of a hunting-dog that
has hit on a warm scent.

Strong fingers and a fruit knife quickly extracted the painting from its
frame and loosened the canvas from its stretcher, proving that the latter
held in fact two canvases instead of one. Between these had been secreted
several sheets of notepaper of two kinds, stamped with two crests, all
black with closely penned handwriting.

Lanyard gathered them into a sheaf and scanned them cursorily, even with
distaste. True enough, it might be argued that he had bought and paid for
the right to pry into the secrets they betrayed; but it was not a right he
enjoyed exercising. A fairly thoroughgoing state of sophistication,
together with some innate instincts of delicacy, worked to render him to a
degree immune to such gratification as others might derive from being made
privy to an exotic affair of the heart. Revelation of human weakness was no