There was a long pause, during which Anitchkoff sipped his cognac nervously, waiting for my comment.  I pressed him ruthlessly for the bitter end of the tale.

“Your hypnotism I grant, but what about Mantovani and Brooks?” I asked bluntly.

“For Mantovani I have no right to speak,” Anitchkoff replied with dignity.  “He was my master and I can admit no imputation on his memory.  Besides, your guess is as good as mine.  Whether he bought the picture in his precritical days, keeping it as a warning and imposing it upon his followers as a hoax—­this I can merely conjecture.  As for Brooks, the case is simple; he couldn’t resist a Giorgione at a bargain.  But since you will, you may as well hear the rest of the story—­at least my part of it.

“Three years later I wintered in Paris.  I had run into Bing’s for a chat and a look at the Hokusais, when who should come in but Hanson Brooks in a high state of elation.  An important purchase had just arrived.  He urged us both to dine and inspect it.  Bing was engaged; I glad to accept.  At dinner Brooks teased me to the top of his bent.  I was to imagine absolutely the most important old master in private possession, his for a beggarly price.  I declined to humour him by guessing, and we slurred his sweets and coffee to hasten to the apartment.  On a dressing table faced to the wall was a little panel which he slowly turned into view.  For a moment I gasped for joy, it was the Del Puente Giorgione; and then an awful misgiving overcame me—­I saw it as it was.  Brooks marked my amazement and, misreading the cause, slapped me on the back and asked what I thought of that for a hundred thousand pesetas.  The figure again bowled me over.  For the picture as it stood it was a thousand times too much, while a mere tithe of the value of the name the panel bore.  I blurted out that the price was suspiciously wrong, and added that I must see the portrait by daylight before venturing an opinion.  The thought that Mantovani had owned it for twenty years and more made a sleepless night hideous; at sunrise my loyalty reasserted itself by a lame compromise.

“I daresay you will not blame me for hoping against hope, as I did the next day and for some months after, that somewhere under that modern paint there was indeed a sketch by Giorgione’s hand.  You must remember that I could as little doubt my own existence as Mantovani’s judgment on such a point.  In the sequel it seemed as if no humiliation were to be spared me.  It was Mantovani’s chief rival and favourite victim, Merck, who after a torturing correspondence had the pleasure of telling me he had seen the ‘Zorzi’ painted by the amateur Ricard; it was Campbell who, after recommending it to Brooks, publicly accused me of dishonest brokerage.  That’s all I can tell you about the Del Puente Giorgione.”

I seized his hand impulsively, and clumsily offered him, in a breath, whisky, shuffleboard, or cowboy pool—­sound Pretorian remedies for all human woes.  These consolations he refused and took his leave.  Midnight found me in the same chair, thinking less of Anitchkoff, whose case now lay clear, than of Mantovani and the Marquesa del Puente, about whom it seemed there still might be something to say.