Cornelius van Koppen loved a good liar.  He knew something about the gentle art.  It was an art, he used to say, which no fool should be allowed to cultivate.  There were too many amateurs knocking about.  These bunglers spoiled the trade.  Without doing any good to themselves, they roused distrust; they rubbed the fine bloom off human credulity.  His puritan conscience was enraged at petty thefts, petty forgeries, petty larcenies.  That was why he despised that otherwise excellent person, the Financial Commissioner for Nicaragua, whose wildest flights of embezzlement never exceeded a few hundred dollars.  He respected a man who, like himself, could work in the grand style.  To play upon the credulity of a continent—­it was Napoleonic, it was like stealing a kingdom; it was not stealing at all.  This, he shrewdly suspected, was what his good friend the Count was engaged upon.  That delightful old man was working in the grand style.

Bronzes, ancient or modern, were Greek to Mr. van Koppen.  He could not tell the difference between the art of Clodion and of Myron—­had, in fact, never heard the names of these good people and did not particularly care to hear them; he paid Sir Herbert Street for that part of the business.  But he had picked up, in the course of his long humanitarian career, a good deal of general knowledge.  Old Koppen was no fool.  He was intelligent; intelligence, as the Count had said, being perfectly compatible with progress.  The millionaire could put two and two together as fast as most men; he was celebrated, even among his quick-witted compatriots, for an uncanny faculty of walking round people without getting off his chair.  Common sense, he called it.

Many a time he had listened to Count Caloveglia’s rounded periods anent the Locri Faun.  Taking his own personal experience as a guide, he had come to the conclusion that a man does not explain things quite so satisfactorily, unless he has some business in hand.  Everything fitted into a hypothesis which had been slowly maturing in his mind, namely, that he was confronted by a fraud, a really noble fraud, a fraud after his own heart, a fraud deserving the fullest support of every sensible man and woman.

That vineyard, for instance, with those antiquities.  A good many friends of his in the States had made their pile out of salted gold mines.  Why not salt a vineyard?  Oh yes; everything fitted in beautifully.  The remoteness of that vineyard . . . a town like Locri was obviously unsafe, too public a place for such important discoveries.  The conscientious Sir Herbert would certainly want to make enquiries on the spot—­enquiries which would prove that no Faun had ever been found there.  And that would ruin everything.  Therefore the statue had been “carried” to the vineyard in ancient times by “some young and ardent lover of art.”  Carried, ha, ha!  His knowledge of human nature made him doubt whether the Locri Faun had ever in its life made a further journey than to Caloveglia’s shady courtyard from that mysterious, dusty shed at the back of his house.  Or the Demeter either.  That “sadly mutilated head” was a feeler—­a rehearsal.  They both came “from the same workshop.”  Excellent!  That shed was the workshop—­the birthplace of these two antiques; the Count himself their old Hellenic creator.