They were neat, and they were fussy, and every picture was identified underneath it in a tidy, old-fashioned hand. Ah, yes; the handwriting of Francis’s grandfather, and the albums were the work, the beloved hobby, of the old Senator, Hamish McRory. He must have spent a good deal of money on them, for they had been specially made and every album was identified on its cover, in gold printing that had not tarnished (so it must have been true gold leaf), “Sun Pictures”.

They were more personal than the secretary had suspected from a quick examination. The first three looked like a record of a turn-of-the-century Ontario town, streets deep in mud, or snow, or baked by summer sun, with lurching, drunken telephone poles and cobwebs of wires, and in the streets were horse-and-rig equipages, huge drays laden with immense, unmilled logs drawn by four horses apiece, and citizens in the dress of the day, some blurred because the Senator’s lens had not been quick enough to stop them in action. There were scenes in a lumber-camp, where men struggled with chains and crude hoists to heave those immense logs onto the drays. There were loggers, strong men with huge beards, standing with their big woodsmen’s axes beside trees they had felled, or sawn through. There were pictures of horses, giant Percherons, poorly groomed but well fed, and they too had their names carefully entered: Daisy, Old Nick, Lady Laurier, Tommy, Big Eustache, horses that dragged the logs from the forests, patient, reliable, and strong as elephants. This is where the first Cornish money came from, thought Darcourt. From lumbering, when lumbering was a very different matter from what it is today. Pictures of saw-pits, with the top-sawyer standing on the log above his monstrous saw, and the under-sawyer peeping from the bottom of the pit. Were they proud that the Senator had wanted to take their pictures? Their stiff faces betrayed nothing, but they had a look of pride in their bodies; they were men who knew their work. Fine stuff, this. A record of a Canada gone forever. Some social historian would love to get his hands on it. But there was nothing here of the faces Darcourt hoped to find.

On to the other three. This looked more promising. Priests, in soutanes and birettas, sitting in constrained postures beside a little table, on which a book lay open. A sharp-looking little man, obviously a doctor, for on his table lay an old-fashioned straight stethoscope and a skull. But this woman, in the little cap? This woman standing at her kitchen door, holding a basin and a ladle? These were the faces Darcourt wanted. Could they be—?

Yes, indeed they were. Look, here in the fifth album! A lovely girl, and certainly Francis’s mother in her youth. Astiff, soldierly man, wearing an eyeglass. Beyond a doubt these were the Lady and the one-eyed Knight from The Marriage at Cana. Underneath, the Senator had written, “Mary-Jim and Frank, their first week in Blairlogie”. Francis’s parents but not as he knew them from later pictures; these were Mary-Jim and Frank as the child Francis first knew them. And then—this was a treasure, this was the clincher!—a handsome, dark-browed young man, perhaps not more than eighteen; this was “My grandson Francis, on leaving Colborne College, 1929”.

So there it was! He had the key to the lock in his hand at last! But was Darcourt excited, exultant? No, he was very calm, like a man from whom doubt and anxiety had all been swept away. Patience has been rewarded, he thought, and then put the thought from him as savouring of pride. There was one album left.

“Thou hast kept the best wine till the last”. The inscribed banner that floated from the mouth of that strange angel in The Marriage at Cana was proven by what he now turned over, with a feeling of wonder. “My coachman, Zadok Hoyle”; the fine-looking, soldierly, but—to the observant eye—unlucky man who stood by a fine carriage and a pair of bays was unquestionably the huissier, the jolly man with the whip in The Marriage. And then—at last Darcourt lost his calm, phlegmatic acceptance of his great good luck—here, among pictures of bearded, ancient, youthful, hearty, and unstable citizens of Blairlogie at the turn of the century, was a picture of a dwarf, standing in front of a humble shop, squinting into the sun but grinning subserviently as the Senator—the local great man—took his Sun Picture. And underneath was written, “F. X. Bouchard, tailor”. The dwarf who stood so confidently, so proudly, in The Marriage and—just possibly—the original of Drollig Hansel.

Was this—could it be—the awakening of the little man?

The kindly assistant librarian popped her head around the partition.

“Would you like a cup of coffee, Professor Darcourt?”

“By God, I would,” said Simon, and the secretary, somewhat startled by the vehemence of his reply, set before him a waxed-paper cup of the liquid which the staff of the Library called, with scholarly generosity, coffee.

It was in this lukewarm, muddy draught that Darcourt drank to his good fortune. Here he sat, amid the evidence that settled a mystery of significance to the world of art. He, Simon Darcourt, had identified the figures in The Marriage at Cana, thereby showing it to be of our own time, telling in a finely contrived riddle the life experience of the painter. He had destroyed the fine-spun theory of Aylwin Ross and identified for all time The Alchemical Master.

It was the late Francis Cornish.

But it was not of the sensation in the art world Darcourt thought. It was of his book. His biography. It was not merely lifted out of the dullness he had feared; it had taken wings.

Like a good scholar he piled up the albums neatly on the big table in the alcove he was using. Never leave a mess. He blessed Francis Cornish and the primary precept of scholarship: never throw anything away. He would return tomorrow and make copious notes.

As he worked he was humming again. One of the metrical Psalms, this time.

Ottawa is not a place to which anyone goes at the end of November simply for pleasure. Reputedly the coldest capital city in the world, in comparison with which Moscow is merely chilly, it is preparing at the end of the year for its annual ferocious assault on the endurance, good nature, and ingenuity of its inhabitants. Darcourt was glad that the National Gallery was luxuriously warm, and he scuttled between it and his hotel, his collar turned up against the sneaping winds from the river and the canal, cold in body but deliciously warm in spirit. Everything he found out from yet another and rigorous examination of what Francis Cornish had defined as his Old Master Drawings confirmed the great discovery he had made in the University Library.

Like everything else Francis had left behind him, the many portfolios and envelopes were a jumble, but a jumble of treasures, some substantial and some of less importance. The assemblages of Francis’s own drawings were honestly labelled; student work, mostly; creditable in the detailed care they showed, and a little eccentric in the trouble the artist had taken in finding real old paper for his work, and preparing it for his silver-point studies. Why so much trouble for what was, after all, simply a student exercise? Each drawing was labelled, with detailed information about which original had been copied, and the date when the copy had been made. But there was about them a hint, which Darcourt took care not to allow to swell into a certainty, that the copy was almost as good as the original and in some cases was every bit as good—though it was identified as a copy. Francis, in another century and with a living to make, could have done well as one of those patient copyists who supplied wealthy tourists with copies of drawings they admired. The talent of the copyist may be very great—technically greater than that of many artists who would scorn such work and have no talent for it—but he remains a copyist.