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While she was thus dreaming away the afternoon, the concert being ended, the throng pressed toward the gallery, and the confusion of voices, high in key and surging on, brought Brooke quickly to herself. Rising, she turned over the pages of the catalogue, reading the artists’ names, and sauntered down the line to where the numbers began, nodding occasionally, or saying a few words to friends that came up; some of whom were stopping to see the pictures, others merely noting the scenic effect of the whole. Suddenly she halted so abruptly, her fingers gripping the page between them with noticeable tension, that a man behind nearly fell over her, while her eyes fastened on the letters that said, “24: Eucharistia. M. Lorenz. 1901.” Before she could read the details opposite, the man whom she had stopped, Charlie Ashton (now Carolus, cousin to Lucy Dean and a courtesy artist possessed of a popular studio for concerts) looked over her shoulder and said:—

“Ah, Miss Lawton, looking for the picture the Senator’s gone daft about, because he thinks the woman in it looks like his wife when he first saw her as a girl out in the California wine country? It’s over this way, that one with the long palm over the frame. I’ve just come from there; everybody’s crowding round, guessing what the name means. I suggested making up a guessing pool on it at five a head, and letting the winner choose the charity; the Bishop is having a shy at it now.”