There is where
your story fails."
"Ah, but it had already gone! It was perhaps by then in the house of a
foreign millionaire. No, no, my story hangs together: The great picture
disappears! A month later--time exactly for its arrival in America and
the payment for it to be sent over here--her excellency of no money
comes out in such a motor-car as that! And sables! I have an eye for
furs. My father was in the business. The value of those she has on runs
easily into the seventy or eighty thousand _lire_. Here she comes now,
out of the banker's where American money is most often paid! Do you want
better evidence?"
He had been punctuating all he said with his fingers, and now, with a
final snap of arms and a shrug of shoulders, he looked up in keen
triumph at his companion.
The other--slower and less excited than the narrator (probably because
he was not the discoverer of the plot)--nevertheless showed lively
interest. "It is very grave," he admitted at last. "But the Sansevero
family is illustrious. We may not proceed against them without due
consideration. I shall report the case to the chief of our secret
service, and the prince must be----"
A tall, athletic young man who had been changing some foreign gold into
Italian, came into the open doorway of the office. A carriage, passing
at that moment close to the curb, had prevented the two men from hearing
the stranger's footfall, and as the latter stood on the top step,
searching in his pocket for matches, he happened to catch the name
"Sansevero.
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