The media frenzy surrounding the auction of philanthropist Brooke Astor’s estate—which last week brought $18.8 million at Sotheby’s—should be echoed to some degree at Stair Galleries in Hudson, New York, on October 5. But it likely won’t, due to a professional vow of silence on the part of the regional auction house.

Billed only as “Property of a Lady,” the Stair sale offers 299 Astor belongings, the less valuable but no less attractive items that remained after Sotheby’s skimmed off the real-estate heiress’s finest furniture, jewels, bibelots, and books. Colin Stair, the president and founder of Stair, declined to confirm that the items are Astor’s, writing in an e-mail, “I’m afraid our ‘Property of a Lady’ consignor would like to remain anonymous, and I am contractually obliged to do that.”

So what clues connect the Stair sale to the doorstep of Astor, who died in 2007 at the age of 105? Lot 66, for instance, is a sturdy brass chronometer engraved with the word NOMA—which was the name of a 1902 steam yacht owned by her father-in-law, John Jacob Astor IV. Lot 132 is a distinctive beaded latticework gown by Arnold Scaasi that Astor wore at several events in the 1990s. The Albert Hadley–designed bookcases offered as Lot 230 are the same lacquered-fabric-clad shelving units that the interior decorator placed in the Philosophers’s Room, a glass-walled library at Holly Hill, Astor’s mansion in Briarcliff Manor, New York.

In fact, numerous objects in the Stair auction even appear in the Sotheby’s catalogue in photographs of rooms at Holly Hill and Astor’s 14-room duplex at 778 Park Avenue, including a Louis XV–style painted étagère (Holly Hill sunroom) and vintage brass floor lamps (Park Avenue library).

Proof of provenance doesn’t get much better than that. So if you missed out at Sotheby’s last week, check your funds and get ready to bid.