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Meantime some kind of conspiracy was on foot. Maud went off whole mornings with Watkins and Uncle Ezra. We were left out as unsympathetic. Painter wandered about like a sick ghost. He would sit glowering at Maud and Watkins while they held whispered conversations at the other end of the hall. Watkins was the hero. He had accepted Flugel’s judgment with impudent grace.

“A copy of Titian, of course,” he said to me; “really, it is quite hard on poor Miss Vantweekle. People, even learned people, who don’t know about such things, had better not advise. I have had the photographs of all Titian’s pictures sent on, and we have found the original of your cousin’s picture. Isn’t it very like?”

It was very like; a figure was left out in the copy, the light was changed, but still it was a happy guess of Flugel.

“Well, what are you going to do about it?” I said to Maud, who had just joined us.

“Oh, Mr. Watkins has kindly consented to manage the matter for me; I believe he has a friend here, an artist, Mr. Hare, who will give expert judgment on it. Then the American vice-consul is a personal friend of Mr. Watkins, and also Count Corner, the adviser at the Academy. We shall frighten the old Jew, sha’n’t we, Mr. Watkins?”

I walked over to the despised Madonna that was tipped up on its side, ready to be walked off on another expedition of defamation.

“Poor Bonifazio,” I sighed, “Maud, how can you part with a work of fine art that has meant so much to you?”

“Do you think, Jerome, I would go home and have Uncle Higgins, with his authentic Rembrandt and all his other pictures, laugh at me and my Titian? I’d burn it first.”

I turned to Uncle Ezra. “Uncle, what strange metamorphosis has happened to this picture? The spiritual light from that color must shine as brightly as ever; the intrinsic value remains forever fixed in Maud’s soul; it is desecration to reject such a precious message. Why, it’s like sending back the girl you married because her pedigree proved defective, or because she had lost her fortune. It’s positively brutal!”

Maud darted a venomous glance at me; however, I had put the judge in a hole.

“I cannot agree with you, Jerome.” Uncle Ezra could never be put in a hole. “Maud’s case is a very different one from Mr. Painter’s or mine. We can carry back what we like personally, but for Maud to carry home a doubtful picture into the atmosphere she has to live in–why, it would be intolerable–with her uncle a connoisseur, all her friends owners of masterpieces.” Uncle Ezra had a flowing style. “It would expose her to annoyance, to mortification–constant, daily. Above all, to have taken a special gift, a fund of her aunt’s, and to apply it in this mistaken fashion is cruel.”

Painter remarked bitterly to me afterward, “He wants to crawl on his share of the responsibility. I’d buy the picture if I could raise the cash, and end the whole miserable business.”

Indeed, Watkins seemed the only one blissfully in his element. As my wife remarked, Watkins had exchanged his interest in pictures for an interest in woman. Certainly he had planned his battle well. It came off the next day. They all left in a gondola at an early hour. Painter and I watched them from the balcony. After they were seated, Watkins tossed in carelessly the suspected picture. What went on at the antichita’s no one of the boat-load ever gave away. Watkins had a hold on the man somehow, and the evidence of the fraud was overwhelming. About noon they came back, Maud holding an enormous envelope in her hand.

“I can never, never thank you enough, Mr. Watkins,” she beamed at him. “You have saved me from such mortification and unhappiness, and you were so clever.”

That night at dinner Uncle Ezra was more than usually genial, and beamed upon Maud and Watkins perpetually. Watkins was quite the hero and did his best to look humble.

“How much rent did the spiritual influence cost, Maud?” I asked. She was too happy to be offended. “Oh, we bought an old ring to make him feel pleased, five pounds, and Mr. Hare’s services were worth five pounds, and Mr. Watkins thinks we should give the vice-consul a box of cigars.

“Let’s see; ten pounds and a box of cigars, that’s three hundred lire at the price of exchange. You had the picture just three weeks, a hundred lire a week for the use of all that education in art, all that spiritual influence. Quite cheap, I should say.”

“And Mr. Watkins’s services, Maud!” my wife asked, viciously. There was a slight commotion at the table.

“May I, Maud?” Watkins murmured.

“As you please, Charles,” Maud replied, with her eyes lowered to the table.

“Maud has given herself,” Uncle Ezra said, gleefully.

Painter rose from the table and disappeared into his room. Pretty soon he came out bearing a tray with a dozen champagne glasses, of modern-antique Venetian glass.

“Let me present this to you, Miss Vantweekle,” he pronounced, solemnly, “as an engagement token. I, I exchanged my picture for them this morning.”

“Some Asti Spumante, Ricci.”

“To the rejected Titian–” I suggested for the first toast.

VENICE, May, 1896.