After a two days' trial of the rooms, the doctor and the trained nurse, who scornfully slept amid the collection, regarding it as a permanent centre of infection, declared the situation impossible, and with the slightest preliminary consultation of bewildered John, white-coated men were sent for, who carried Miriam to the hospital. About her door John hung like a miserable debarred ghost, for after the first few days her mind wandered painfully, and his presence excited her dangerously. For weeks he vacillated between perfunctory work at the office, unsatisfactory talks with busy doctors and impatient nurses, and long apprehensive hours in what had been home. In "Little Venice," in the best powder-blue jar and the rest, he found no solace, on the contrary, the occasion of revolting suggestions. There was an imp that whispered that she must die and that he should resume collecting. With horror he fled the evil place, and spent an endless night on tolerance within hearing of her moanings.

Fevers have this of merciful, that a term is set for them. Her malady though it often maims cruelly rarely kills. The temperature line on the chart, which for days had described a Himalaya, dwindled suddenly to a Sierra, as quickly to an Appalachian, and then became a level plain. Terribly wracked by the ordeal but safe they pronounced her. The visiting physician occasionally omitted her in his daily round. But convalescence was more trying than the struggle with the fever. The lethargic hours seldom brought either sleep or rest. Beset by nervous fears, the collective suffering of the giant building weighed upon her, and she begged to be taken home.

It was a pathetic triumphal entry that she made among their household gods. The sheer grotesqueness of her home struck her painfully for the first time, as she was helped to an ancient chair that stood before the suspended Kirman rug—her throne John had always called it. As she once more occupied it, there came a curious revulsion against her gorgeously shabby domain. Other women, she reflected, had neat places, cool expanses of wallpaper, furniture seemly set apart. She resented the stuffiness of it all, the air of musty preciousness that pervaded the room. And when John took both her hands and said: "Now the collection is itself again; the queen has come home," she broke down and cried. She did much of that in the weeks that followed. You would have supposed her another person than plucky Miriam Baxter. But the situation hardly made for cheerfulness. Light housekeeping being no longer practicable, they depended on the unwilling ministrations of a slovenly maid. John, who, to do him justice, had never boasted much surplus vitality, felt vaguely that something was now due from him that he could not supply. To escape an inadequacy that was painful he drifted back to the exhibitions and sales, this time alone. He never bought anything, for he was saving manfully for a purpose that daily increased in his mind. He would pay with his pocketbook what with his person he could not.

His always modest luncheon reduced itself to a sandwich, he walked to save carfares, cut off two Sunday newspapers, wore a threadbare spring overcoat into the winter. Then one day he took Miriam to a famous specialist from whom they learned very much what they already knew, but with the advantage of working orders. The great man told John in brief that it was a bad recovery which might readily become worse. A change and open air life were imperative; a sea voyage would be best. If such a change were not made, and soon, he would not be answerable for the consequences.

All this John retold in softened form to Miriam in the waiting room. "We might as well give it up," she said resignedly. "Of course we can't travel. We haven't the money, and you can't get away." With the nearest approach to pride he had ever shown in a nonaesthetic matter John protested that he could get away, and better yet that there was money, five hundred good dollars, more than enough for a glimpse at the Azores and Gibraltar, a hint of rocky Sardinia, a day at Naples, a quiet fortnight on the sunny Genoese Riviera, and then home again by the long sea route. His thin voice rose as he pictured the voyage. Even she caught something of his spirits, and as they got off the car near Novelli's, by a sudden inspiration John said, "Now for being a good girl, and doing what the doctor says, you shall see the most beautiful thing in New York."

In a minute Novelli was carefully taking the precious thing from its drawer and solemnly unfolding the square of ruby velvet in which it lay. Miriam saw the rigid Christ, at the left Mary Mother in azure enamel, at the right the Beloved Apostle in Crimson. From the top God Father sent down the pearly dove through the blue. Below, a stately pelican offered its bleeding breast to the eager bills of its young. And it all glowed translucently within its sharp Gothic mouldings. Behind, the design was simpler—in enamelled discs the symbols of the evangelists. St. Lucy's knuckle lay visible under a crystal lens at the crossing, and surely relic of a saint was seldom encased more splendidly. Even pathetic Miriam kindled to it. "Yes, it is the most beautiful thing in New York," she admitted. "I suppose it costs a fortune, Mr. Novelli." "No, a mere nothing, for it, six hundred dollars." "Why, we might almost buy it," she cried. "It's lucky you haven't saved more, John. I really believe you would buy it." "I'd like to sell it to Mr. Baxter," said Novelli, "he understands it," only to be cut short with a brusque, "No, it's out of our class, but I wanted Mrs. Baxter to see it, and I wanted you to know that she appreciates a fine object as much as I do." "Evidently," said Novelli as they parted. "I hope she will do me the honour of coming in often; there are few who understand, and whether they buy or not I am always glad to have them in my place."

About a week later John Baxter closed and locked his office desk, hurried down to the savings bank, and drew five hundred dollars. Most of it was to go into steamer tickets forthwith, a little balance was to be changed into Italian money. As he meditated a route downtown, he recalled the only adieu still left unpaid. To be sure the cross had remained for three years at Novelli's but it might go forever any day, and with it a great resource for a weary moralist. Farewells were plainly in order, and with no other thought he walked back to the shop and greeted Novelli, who without waiting to be asked produced the crimson parcel that contained the precious relic. As John looked it over from panel to panel, as if to stamp every composition upon his memory, Novelli watched him, reflected, hesitated, smiled benevolently, and spoke. "Mr. Baxter, I am in great need of money and must sacrifice the cross. I want you to take it. Vogelstein has offered me four hundred and fifty dollars for it but he shall not have it if I can sell it to anybody who deserves it better and will value it. It is yours at that price. What do you say?"

John tried for words that failed to come.

"It's a bargain, Mr. Baxter," pursued Novelli, "but of course if you don't happen to have the money there's nothing more to say."

"But I have it right here," retorted John in perplexity, "only it's for quite a different purpose."

"You know your own business, of course, and I don't urge you, but if you have the money and don't take it, you make a great mistake. You know that well enough, and then remember how Mrs. Baxter admired it the other day."

"Yes-s," faltered John dubiously.

"Then why do you hesitate? You know what it is, and what it is worth, as an investment, I mean. By taking your time and selling it right you can surely double your money."

"But"—

"No, there it is. I am honestly doing you a favour," and Novelli thrust the swathed cross into the hands of his fairly hypnotised customer. John's left hand clutched it instinctively, while with the frightened fingers of his right he counted off nine fifty dollar bills.

"Thank you, Mr. Baxter, neither you nor your wife will ever regret it. Nobody in America has anything finer, and that you know."

These words pounded terribly in John's brain as he found his way home, stumbled up stairs, and boggled with the latchkey. All the way down, unheeded passersby had wondered at the crimson burden (he had not waited for a parcel to be made) hugged closely to the shabby black cutaway. The danger signal smote Miriam in the eyes as she rose to be kissed. Standing away from her, he placed the shrouded cross on the table and tried for the confession that would not say itself.

"Why, it's our cross," she cried wonderingly. "Mr. Novelli has lent it to us for a last look before we go where the lovely thing was made. But, John, what's the matter? How you do look! Has something awful happened?"

"Yes," and the pale nondescript head sunk into his hands. "I have bought it. I don't know how. I had the money, I was there, and I bought it."

She repressed the word that was on her lips, and the harder thought that was in her mind, looked long at his humiliation until the pity of a mother came over her tired face. She had mercifully escaped scorning him. Then she spoke.

"It was a bad time to buy it, wasn't it, Dear, but it is a beautiful thing, almost worth a real trip to Italy." She added with a curious air of a suppliant, "And then perhaps we can sell it."

"Yes, that's so, perhaps we can sell it," echoed John listlessly, wrapping the cross closely in its crimson cover and laying it in his most treasured lacquer box. "Yes, perhaps we can sell it," he repeated, and there was a long silence between them.



THE MISSING ST. MICHAEL

Dennis, our Epicurean sage, addressed us all as we lolled on his terrace, drank his tea, and divided our attention between his fluent wisdom and his spacious view of the Valdarno.

"The question is," he repeated, "what will Emma do? Will she be brave, or, rather ordinary enough, to act for herself and him, or will she refuse him because of what she thinks we shall think of them both? As we calmly sit here she may be deciding. That is if you are sure, Harwood, that Crocker was really bound for Emma's when you saw him."

"How could anybody mistake his beaming Emma face?" growled Harwood. "He was marching like a squad of Bersaglieri." "And she knows that Crocker wants it terribly?" added the Sage's wife.

"She does, indeed," sighed Frau Stern repentantly, "for that demon (pointing to Harwood) did tell me and I haf, babylike, told her."

"Here is the case, then," resumed Dennis: "She knows we know Crocker wants her and it, but she doesn't know he doesn't know she has it."

"Precisely, most clearly and gracefully put, my dear," laughed Mrs. Dennis.

"And she knows, too," he pursued imperturbably, "that we may think he wants her merely for it."

"Bravo!" puffed Harwood smokily from his camp-stool. "She is too clever to expect any weak generosity from any of us. She believes we will think the worst. And won't we? Viva Nietzsche, and perish pity!"

"Shame upon us, then," cried Frau Stern. "She will gif up that fine young man for fear of our talk? Never!"

"She will send him away, dear Frau Stern, the moment he gives her the chance," declared Dennis. "What else can she do? She can never take the chance of our surmises. Behold us, the destroyers! The victims are prepared."

"Can't we do something about it?" Harwood chuckled. "Repent? Be as harmless as doves? Let's write a roundrobin solemnly stating that, to the best of our knowledge and belief, he wants her for herself and not for it."

"Gently," exclaimed Mrs. Dennis, as she blew out Harwood's poised and lighted match. "You surely don't imagine Crocker will propose the very day she shows it to him."

"My dear," protested Dennis, "don't we all know him well enough to understand that any shock will produce that effect? If his mother died or his horse, his vines got the scale, his Ghirlandaio sprung a crack, his university gave him an honorary degree—these would all be reasons for proposing to Emma. Dear old Crocker is like that; any jolt would affect him that way."

"Has it occurred to anybody that Emma may have foreseen just this complication and quietly got rid of it first?" suggested Mrs. Dennis, the really practical member of our group, adding, "That's how I'd have served you if I'd wanted him."

"Never," responded Dennis. "She loves it too well, and then she would feel we felt she had spirited it away on purpose."

"Besides," continued Harwood, whose buried aspirations Emmawards had long ago flowered into a minute analysis of her moods, "she is true blue, you know. She will never serve us like that. She may immolate the mighty Crocker upon the altar of our collective curiosity, but she will never dodge us."

"Cannot we all go back to our own countries and leave them alone," suggested Frau Stern almost tearfully; "but no; we no longer haf countries. Here we belong; elsewhere the air is too strong for our little lungs. I pity us, and I pity more those poor young people. If only they will but haf the sense to trample on our talk."

"That, too, would be a sensation," Dennis added cheerfully, and we went our ways, as usual, without having reached anything so vulgar as a conclusion.

* * * * *

Meanwhile Emma Verplanck stood in the loggia of her tiny villa and winced in the focus of the curiosities she despised. She scanned the white road that rimmed her valley before descending sharply to Florence beyond the hill, and especially the crescent of dust where an approaching figure would first appear. Now and then, as if for a rest, her eye traced the line of flaming willows down toward the plunge of her brook into the larger valley, or the file of spectral poplars that led into the vineyards hanging on the declivity of Fiesole. Above all, the gaunt and gashed bulk of Monte Ceceri glistened hotly against a pale blue sky, for if it was a backward April, the first stirring of summer was already in the air. She thrilled with disgust as she asked herself why she dreaded this call. Why should she fear lest an elementary test, a very simple explanation such as she planned for that afternoon, should compromise an established friendship?

Interrupting this self-examination the mighty but unwieldy form of Morton Crocker loomed in the white dust crescent, and his premature panama swiftly followed the curve of the low grey wall towards her gate. As his steps were heard, her mind flew to the forbidding St. Michael on his gold background in her den and she could fairly hear Harwood saying to all of us, "Three to one on the Saint, who takes me?" The jangling of the bell recalled her to Crocker, and she braced herself in the full sunlight to receive him. For a moment, as he loomed in the archway, she indulged that especial pride which we reserve for that which we might possess but austerely deny ourselves.

Her mingled moods produced an unusual softness. Crocker felt it and wondered as she gave him her hand and had him sit for a prudent moment outside. All the hot way up the valley he had had a sense of a crisis. It was odd to be summoned whither he had been drifting for four years, and now the sight of Emma disarmed, perplexed him. It seemed ominous. One finds such transparent kindness in clever people generally at parting, when one would be remembered for one's self and not for a phrase. Then Crocker for an instant glimpsed the wilder hope that the softening was for him and not for an occasion. Emma had never seemed more desirable than to-day. A white strand or two in her yellow hair, the tiny wrinkles at the corners of her steady grey eyes, and the untimely thinness of her long white fingers made him eager to ward off the advancing years at her side, to keep unchanged, as it were, these precious evidences that she had lived.

Some sense of his tenderness she must have had, for as she chatted gravely about his farming, about the lateness of the almond blossoms, about everything except people, who always tempted her sharp tongue, her manner became almost maternally solicitous. "To-day you shall have your first tea in my den, Crocker" (so much she presumed on her two years' seniority), she said at last, "and you are commanded to like my things." "What has thy servitor done to deserve this grace?" he managed to reply. "Nothing," she said, "graces never are for deserts. Or, rather, you poor fellow, you have been asked to tramp out here in this glare and really deserve to sit where it is cool." As they walked through the hall and the little drawing-room Crocker still felt uneasily that no road with Emma Verplanck could be quite as smooth as it seemed.

The den deserved its name, being a tiny brown room with a single arched window that looked askance at the cypresses and bell towers of Fiesole. Beside a couch, an Empire desk, and solid shelves of books, the den contained only a couple of chairs and the handful of things that Emma laughingly called her collection. As Crocker took in vaguely bits of Hispano-Moresque and mellow ivories, a broad medal or so and a well-poised Renaissance bronze, a Japanese painting on the lighted wall, and one or two drawings by great contemporaries, Emma's friends, he was amazed at the quality of everything. A sense of extreme fastidiousness rebuked, in a way, his more indiscriminate zeal as a collector. Uncomfortably near him on the dark wall he began to be aware of something marvellous on old gold when tea interrupted his observations. Tea with Emma was always engrossing. The mere practice and etiquette of it brought the gentlewoman in her into a lovely salience. Her hands and eyes became magical, her talk light and constant without insistency. A symbolist might imagine eternal correspondence between the amber brew and her sunny hair. It was easy to adore Emma at tea, and generally she did not resent a discreetly pronounced homage. But this afternoon she grew almost petulant with Crocker as they talked at random, and finally laughed out impatiently: "I really can't bear your ignoring my St Michael, especially as you have never seen him before and may never see him again. St. Michael, Mr. Morton Crocker."

"My respects," smiled Crocker, as he turned lazily toward the gilded panel. There was the warrior saint, his lines stiff, expressive and hieratic, his armour glistening in grey-blue fastened with embossed gilded clasps; here and there gorgeous hints of a crimson doublet—the unmistakable enamel, the grave and delicate tension of a masterpiece by the rare Venetian, Carlo Crivelli. Crocker gasped and started from his seat, losing at once his cup, his muffin, and his manners. "By Jove, Miss Verplanck, Emma, it's my missing St. Michael. Where did you ever find it? I must have it." His toasted muffin rolled unconsidered beside the spoon at his feet. Emma retrieved the cup—one of a precious six in old Meissen—he retained the saucer painfully gripped in both hands.

"I was afraid it was," she answered, "but look well and be sure."

"Of course we must be sure. You'll let me measure it, won't you? It's the only way." Assuming his permission he climbed awkwardly upon the chair, happily a stout Italian construction, and as she watched him with a strange pity, he read off from a pocket rule: "One metre thirty-seven. A shade taller than mine, but there is no frame. Thirty-one centimetres; the same thing. Yes, it is my missing St. Michael," and as he climbed down excitedly he hurried on: "How strange to find it here. I never talked to you about it, did I? That's odd, too. I've been hunting for it for years. You didn't know, I suppose. I want it awfully. What can we do about it?" For Crocker, this fairly amounted to a speech, and before replying Emma gave him time to sit down, and thrust another cup of tea into his unwilling hands. Having thus occupied and calmed him, she said, "I'm very sorry, I hoped it would turn out to be something else. I only learned last week that you wanted it. You have seldom talked about your collecting to me. There's nothing to do about it. I wish there were. You want it so much. But I can't give it to you. That wouldn't do. And I won't sell it to you. I wouldn't to anybody, and then that wouldn't do, either. So there we are. Only think of their talk, and you'll see the situation is impossible."

Crocker's eyes flashed. "There's a lot we might do about it if you will, Emma. Damn the St. Michael. If his case is so complicated, and I don't see it, leave him out of the reckoning between us. Can't you see what I need and want?"

"They wouldn't see it, and I'm shamefully afraid of them," she said simply, and then she added indignantly, "How could you dare, to-day? I can't trust you for any perception, can I?"

Not perceiving that her scruple was belated, Crocker blurted out ruefully. "I'm an ass, and I'm sorry and I'm not. It's what I have wanted to say these many days, and perhaps it might as well be so. But I've wounded you and for that I'm more than sorry."

"Let's not talk about it," Emma said gently. "Of course I'll forgive an old friend for saying a little more than he should. Only you must stop here. You'll forgive me, too, for owning your St. Michael. I'm honestly sorry it happened so. I would dismiss him if I could, for he is likely to cost me a good friend. But he creates a kind of impossibility between us, doesn't he, and for a while it's best you shouldn't come, not till things change with you. It's kindest so, isn't it, Crocker?"

There was more debate to this effect before the impassive St. Michael, until at last Crocker agreed impatiently, "You're right, Emma, or at least you have me at a disadvantage, which comes to the same thing. And yet it's all wrong. You are putting a painted saint between yourself and a friend who wants to be more. It's logical, but it isn't human. As for their talk, they'll talk, anyhow, and we might as well stand it together. I'm probably off for a long time, Emma. I hope you'll find your St. Michael companionable. When you decide to throw him out of the window, let me know. Forgive me again. Good-by." She gave him her hand silently and followed him out into the loggia. As she watched him striding angrily down the valley and away, she had the air of a woman who would have cried if she were not Emma Verplanck.

* * * * *

Crocker was right, we all did talk. And naturally, for had we not all been eagerly awaiting the collision announced by the cessation of his visits and the rumour that he was bound north. In council on Dennis's terrace, however, we came to no unanimous reading of the affair. Generally, we felt that even if Emma wanted a way out, which we guessed to be the fact, she would never expose herself to our batteries, and with regret we opined that there was no way, had we wished, to divest ourselves of our collective formidableness. On all sides we divined a deadlock, with Dennis the only dissenting voice. He insisted scornfully that we none of us knew Emma, that we underestimated both her emotional capacity and her resourcefulness, and, finally, in a burst of rash clairvoyancy he declared that she would give away both the St. Michael and herself, but in her own time and manner, and with some odd personal reservation that would content us all. We should see.

Given the rare mixture of the conventional and instinctive that was Emma Verplanck, something of the sort did indeed seem probable. For ten years she had inhabited her nook, becoming as much of a fixture among us as the Campanile below. She came, like so many, for the cheapness and dignity of it primarily. Here her little patrimony meant independence, safety from perfunctory and uncongenial contacts at home, and more positively all those purtenances of the gentlewoman that she required. But, unlike the merely thrifty Italianates, she never became blunted by our incessant tea giving and receiving. With familiarity, the ineffable sweetness of the country penetrated her with ever-new impressions. She loved the overlapping blue hills that stretched away endlessly from the rim of her valley, and the scarred crag that closed it from behind. She loved the climbing white roads, her chalky brook—sung as a river by the early poets—with its bordering poplars and willows and its processional display of violets, anemones, primroses, blueflags, and roses. She loved even better that constant passing trickle of fine intelligences which feeds the Arno valley as her brook refreshed its vineyard. The best of these came gladly to her, for she was an open and a disillusioned spirit, with something of a man's downrightness under her sensitive appreciation. Hers was the calm of a temperament fined but not dulled by conformity and experience. Mrs. Dennis, whose sources of information were excellent, said it was rather an unhappy girlish affair with an unworthy cousin. Within the limits of the possible, the Verplancks always married cousins, and Emma, it was thought, had in her 'teens paid sentimental homage to the family tradition. In any case she remained surprisingly youthful under her nearly forty years. Her capacity for intellectual adventure seemed only to increase as she passed from the first glow to proved impressions of books, art, persons, and the all-inclusive Tuscan nature.

Her Stuyvesant Square aunts, who were authorities on self-sacrifice, agreed that the only sacrifice Emma had made in a thoroughly selfish life was the purchase of the St. Michael. She had found it, on a visit in Romagna, in the hands of a noble family who knew its value and needed to sell it, but dreaded the vulgarity of a transaction through the antiquaries. To Emma, accordingly, whom they assumed to be rich, they offered it at a price staggering for her, though still cheap for it. From the first she had adored it. There had been a swift exchange of despatches with New York, and the St. Michael went home with her to Florence. After that adventure the small victoria, the stocky pony, and the solemn coachman had never reappeared. Emma walked to teas or, when she must, suffered the promiscuity of the trams. To those of us who knew the store she set by her equipage its exchange for the St. Michael indicated a fairly fanatical devotion. To her aunts it meant that she had spent her principal, which, in their eyes, was an approximation to the mysterious "sin against the Holy Ghost."

It was Dennis who speculated most audaciously, and perhaps truly, about the St. Michael. When he learned that Emma secreted it in her den, where she rarely admitted anyone, he maintained that it had become her incorporeal spouse. The daintiness with which it fingered a golden sword-hilt, as if fearing contamination, symbolised the aloofness of her spirit. The solitary enjoyment of a great impression of art made her den a sanctuary, absolving her from commoner or shared pleasures. And in a manner the Saint was the type of the ultra-virginal quality she had retained through much contact with books and life. For her to sell the St. Michael, Dennis felt, would be a sort of vending of her soul, to give it away in the present instance would imply, he insisted, an instinctive self-surrender of which he judged her incapable.

To Crocker's side of the affair we gave very little thought, considering that he, after all, had created the thrilling importance of the St. Michael. But our general attitude toward the unwonted was one of indifference, and Crocker was too unlike us to permit his orbit to be calculated. The element of foible in him was almost null. None of our guesses ever stuck to him, and we had grown weary of rediscovering that anything so simple could also be so impermeable to our ingenuity. In a word, Crocker's case was as much plainer than Emma's as noonday is than twilight. When one says that he was born in Boston and from birth dedicated to the Harvard nine, eleven, or crew—as it might befall; that he was graduated a candidate for the right clubs, that he took to stocks so naturally that he quickly and safely increased an ample inherited fortune, and this without neglecting horse, or rod, or gun; finally that he carried into maturity a fine boyish ease—when this has been said all has been told about Morton Crocker except the whimsical chance that made him an Italianate.

Some reminiscence of his grand tour had beguiled a tedious convalescence and, following the gleam for want of more serious occupation, he had set sail for Naples with a motor-car in the hold. At thirty-three he brought the keenness of a girl to the galleries, the towns, and the ineffable whole thing. It was Tuscany that completed his capture. He bought a villa and, as his strength came back, began to add new vineyards and orchards to his estate. But this was his play; his serious work became collecting and more particularly, as has been hinted, the quest of the missing St. Michael. When he learned, as a man of means soon must, that good pictures may still be bought in Italy, he promptly succumbed to the covetousness of the collector, and the motor-car became predatory. Its tonneau had contained surreptitious Lottos and Carpaccios. Its gyrations became an object of interest to the Ministry of Public Instruction. Once on crossing the Alps it had been searched to the linings. While Crocker had his ups and downs as a collector, from the first his sense of reality stood him in stead. Being a Bostonian he naturally studied, but even before he at all knew why, he disregarded the pastiches and forgeries, and made unhesitatingly for the good panel in an array of rubbish.

It was this sense for reality that impelled him to settle where the rest of us merely perched. Fifty contadini tilled his domain and actually began to earn out the costly improvements he had introduced. His wine and oil were sought by those who knew and were willing to pay. In the intervals of the major passion Crocker walked up and down the grassy roads superintending the larger operations. His muscular and hulking blondness—he had rowed four years—towered above the dark little men who served, feared, and worshipped him. Unlike the rest of us who preferred to live in a delightful Cloud Cuckoo Town, which happened to be Florence also, he had chosen to take root in Tuscany.

First he purged his castellated villa of the international abuses it had undergone for a century. It had hardly regained its fifteenth century spaciousness and simplicity before it began to fill up again, but this time with pictures and fittings of the time. In all directions he bought with enthusiasm, but his real vocation, after the cultivation of Emma's society, soon came to be the completion of his great and growing altar-piece by Carlo Crivelli. What is usually a frigid exercise, a mere ascertainment that the parts of a scattered ancona are at London, Berlin, St. Petersburg, Boston, etc.—a patient compilation of measurements, documents and probabilities; what is generally a mere pretext for a solid article in a heavy journal—or at best a question of pasting photographs together in the order the artist intended—Crocker converted into an eager and most practical pursuit. Bit by bit he gradually reconstituted his Crivelli in its ancient glory of enamel on gold within its ornate mouldings. The quest prospered capitally until he stuck hopelessly at the missing St. Michael. As it stood for a couple of years complete except for the void where the St. Michael should be, the altar-piece represented less Crocker's abundant resources than his tireless patience and energy. He had picked up the first fragment, a slender St. Catherine of Alexandria demurely leaning upon her spiked wheel, at a provincial antiquary's in Romagna, not far from where the ancona had been impiously dismembered. Fortunately the original Gothic frame remained to give a clue to other panels. Next, word of a Crivelli Madonna with Donors at Christie's took him posthaste to London. Frame, period and measurements proved that it was the central panel, and the tiny donors, a husband and wife with a boy and girl, indicated that the wings had contained two female and two male saints. Between the St. Lucy (which turned up more than a year later in an un-heard-of Swedish collection, and was had only by a hard exchange for a rare Lorenzo Monaco and a plausible Fra Angelico) and the sumptuous St. Augustine, which was brought to the villa in a barrow by a little dealer, there was a longer interval. Meanwhile the frame had been reconstructed, and a niche for the missing saint rose in melancholy emptiness. A little before the sensational rencontre in Emma's den, the chance of finding a rude pilgrim woodcut on the Quai Voltaire revealed the saint's identity. This ugly print informed the faithful that the "prodigious image" of Our Lady existed in the Church of the Carmelites at Borgo San Liberale. One might distinguish at the extreme right of the five compartments a willowy St. Michael in armour, like Chaucer's Squire in a black-letter folio, or if the identification had been doubtful, there was the name below in all letters.

When the print was shown to the scheming Harwood over the afternoon vermouth, he suspended a long discourse on the contemptible fate of being born an Anglo-Saxon, and it came over him with a blessed shock that Emma had the missing St. Michael. Penetrated by the joy of the situation, he hesitated for a moment whether to give the initiative to the man or the woman. A glance at Crocker's uncompromising sturdiness convinced him that on that side the situation might be quickly exhausted. Emma he could trust to do it full justice. Excusing himself abruptly, he made for Frau Stern's lodgings, and with the taste of Crocker's vermouth still in his faithless mouth, told her that Emma's Crivelli was no other than the missing St. Michael. To make matters sure he solemnly bound Frau Stern to secrecy. That accomplished, he strode whistling down through the purple twilight to his well-earned fritto at Paoli's. The next day began our wondering what Emma would do. She did, as is known, a thing that her simple Knickerbocker ancestresses would have approved—presented Crocker to the St. Michael and left the decision modestly to the men. Behind the frankness of her procedure lay, perhaps, a curiosity to see how Crocker would bear himself in a delicate emergency. It was to be in some fashion his ordeal. Thus she might at least shake the appalling equanimity with which he had passed from the stage of comrade to that of suppliant. Not that she doubted him; nobody did that, but she resented a little in retrospect his silence on the subject of the great quest. Was it possible that for these five years he had chatted only about his college pranks, his fishing trips, his orchards and vineyards, and the views? As she reviewed their countless walks and teas, it really seemed as if he had never paid her the compliment of being impersonal. Well, that was ended now at any rate. A little misgiving filled her that she had never revealed the presence of the St. Michael to so good a play-fellow. A delicacy, knowing his incorrigible zeal as a collector, had restrained her, and then, as Dennis had guessed, her den was her sanctuary, admission to which implied an intimacy difficult to concede. Whatever the merits of the case, the rupture had produced in a milieu consumed by the desire to guess what Emma would do, at least one person who was solely interested in what Crocker's next move might be. For the first time in a singularly calculable life he had become an object of genuine curiosity.

He acted with his usual simplicity. To Emma he wrote a brief note upbraiding her for fearing the voices of the valley, professing his eagerness to return when the St. Michael had been put out of the reckoning, and declaring that if it were not soon, he would willy-nilly come back and see how things were between them. It was a letter that wounded Emma, yet somehow warmed her, too, and from its reception we found her in an unwonted attitude of nonconformity to the verdicts of the valley. She began to speak up in behalf of this or that human specimen under our diminishing lenses with the unsubtle and disconcerting bluntness of Morton Crocker himself. The phenomenon kept alive our waning interest during nearly a year of waiting. As for Crocker he gave it out ostentatiously that he was bound for a wonderful Cima in Northumbria and afterward was to try dry-fly fishing on the Itchen. Beyond that he had no plans. All this was characteristically the truth; he bought the Cima, wrote of his baskets to Harwood, but stayed away past his melons, his grapes and his olives. By early winter we heard of him shooting the moose in New Brunswick, and later planning a system of art education in the Massachusetts schools, and it was not till the brisk days of March that we learned the west wind was bringing him our way again.

Meanwhile Emma had acquired a few more grey hairs and had resolutely declined to dispossess herself of the St. Michael. A couple of months after Crocker's leave-taking, a note had come to her from Crespi, the unfrocked priest and consummate antiquarian, who, to the point of improvising a chef d'oeuvre, will furnish anything that this gilded age demands. Crespi most respectfully begged to represent an urgent client, a Russian prince, who desired a fine Crivelli. Would the most gentle Miss Verplanck haply part with hers? The price should be what she chose to name. It was no question of money, but of obliging a client whom Crespi could ill afford to disappoint. Emma curtly declined the offer. The St. Michael was valued for personal reasons and was not for sale. Six weeks later came a more insidious suggestion. The Director of the Uffizi, learning that she possessed a masterpiece of a school sparsely represented in the first Italian gallery, pleading that such an object should not pass from Italy, and representing a number of generous art-lovers who desired to add it to the collections under his care, made the following offer, trusting, however, not to any pecuniary inducement but to her loyalty as an honorary citizen of Florence. The price named was something less than the London value, but its acceptance would have perpetually endowed the victoria, and perhaps—. If the malicious Harwood had not passed the word that the offer was a ruse of the wily Crocker, we all believed that she would have accepted. Indeed, we regretted her obduracy. It would have been such a capital way out, with no sacrifice of her scruples nor waiver of our collective impressiveness. So Harwood came in for mild reprehension, the Sage Dennis remarking with some asperity that when the gods have provided us with farces, comedies, and tragedies in from one to five acts it is unseemly to string them out to six or seven.

Early March, then, saw the deadlock unbroken. The St. Michael had not been dislodged. Emma still was unwavering so far as we knew. We were unable, had we willed, to divest ourselves of our deterrent attributes. But the situation had changed to this extent that Crocker was said to be on his way down to oversee a new system of spring tillage in person.

Emma took his approach with something between terror and an unwonted resignation. From the day when he had planted himself firmly beside her fireplace with a boyish wonder at finding himself so much at home, he had represented the incalculable in her carefully planned life. Declining to accept the attitude of other people toward her, he had almost upset her attitude toward herself. He was the first man since the scapegrace cousin who had neither feared nor yet provoked her sharp tongue. While he relished her wit, it had always been with an unspoken deprecation of its cutting edge. He gave her a queer feeling of having allowances made for her—a condescension that in anybody but this big, likable boy she would have requited with sarcasm. But against him the cheveux de frise she successfully presented to the world seemed of no avail. He knew it was not timber but twigs, and that at worst one was scratched and not impaled. Day by day she watched the cropping of the long line of flaming willow plumes that escorted her brook toward the level. The line dwindled as the shorn pollards gave up their withes to bind the vines to the dwarf maples. She felt the miles between herself and Crocker lessening, and (at rare moments) her scruples ready to be garnered for some sweet and ill-defined but surely serviceable use. But she would not have been Emma Verplanck if the manner of her not impossible surrender had not troubled her more than the act itself. Any lack of tact on the part of the husbandman might still spoil things. She had a whimsical sense that any one of the flaming willows might refuse its contribution to the vineyard should the pruner approach with anything short of a persuasive "con permesso."

Crocker's "by your leave" was so far from persuasive that it left her with a panicky desire to run away—again a new sensation. He wrote:

"DEAR EMMA—

"We have had an endless year to think it over, and the only change on my side is that I need you more than ever. I will go away for real reasons, for your reasons, but for no others. If it is only their talk that separates us, their talk has had twelve good months and shall have no more. I must see you. May I come tomorrow at the old hour?

"As always yours,

"MORTON CROCKER."

Something between wrath and dismay was the result of this challenge. She sat down to answer him according to his impudence, and the words would not come. The greatness of the required sacrifice came over her and therewith the desire to temporise. The voice of many Knickerbocker ancestresses spoke in her, and between herself and a real emergency she interposed the impenetrable buckler of a conventionality. She wrote:

"PENSIOIN SCHALCK, Bad Weisstein, Austrian Tyrol.

"MY DEAR CROCKER—

"It would be pleasant to see you and talk over your trip, but you see by this address it is for the present impossible. As always,

"Cordially yours,

"EMMA VERPLANCK."

When Crocker found Emma's valley as effectually barred as if a battery guarded the approaches, he gave way to a deep resentment. Instinctively hating anything like a trick, to be tricked by Emma at this point was intolerable. His gloom was such that he confided to the malicious Harwood a profound disgust with the irreality of the life Italianate. The podere should be sold as soon as it could be put in order. Such pictures as the Italian Government coveted, it should keep, the rest should go to the Museum at Boston. He himself would grow orange trees in North Cuba where there were things to shoot and, thank heaven, no civilisation. Harwood came breathlessly to Dennis's with the tale, gloating openly that there was to be a seventh act if not an eighth.

A long hard day with his bailiff and the peasants restored Crocker's poise. He looked for the hundredth time over into Emma's valley and divined her attitude. Dreading an interview, she had left the way open to parley. She virtually pleaded for a delay. It was a new and, in a way, delightful sensation to be feared. For the first time in any human relation he exploited a personal advantage and wrote, addressing Bad Weisstein:

"DEAREST EMMA—

"You have wanted a delay. Well, you have it—probably a week already. Make the most of it, for two weeks from this date—I give you time to recover from your journey—I am coming for tea in the old way. Meanwhile you can hardly imagine the impatience of

"Yours more than ever,

"MORTON CROCKER."

Whether Crocker or Emma was more miserable during the fortnight even Dennis could not have told. But there was in his woe something of the sublime stolidity of the man who is going to stand up to be shot or reprieved, whereas she suffered the uncertainty of the soldier who has been drawn to make up the "firing party" for a comrade. She feared that she would not have courage enough to despatch him, and then she feared she would. Meantime the days passed, and she woke up one morning with an odd little shiver reminding her that it was no longer possible to get a note to him by way of Bad Weisstein. Nor had she the heart to move to a nearer coign of constructive absence. Of half measures she was, after all, a foe. Her determination to send Crocker away daily increased, and the implacable St. Michael seemed to command that course. "You are not for him. You represent a whole artificial world in which he cannot breathe. I, the finest incarnation of the most exquisite mannerism of a bygone time, am your spiritual spouse, and you may not lightly renounce me. You have devoted yourself to graceful irrealities and must now abide by your choice." Thus the St. Michael had spoken in a dream in the troubled hours before daybreak, and when Emma went to her den late the next morning she confronted him and admitted, "You are right, St. Michael. It's all true." That afternoon Crocker was coming for tea, and if her New York aunts could have known, even they would have granted that, for the second time in a thoroughly selfish life, Emma was displaying capacities for self-sacrifice.

As Emma and Crocker shook hands that afternoon, one might see that both had aged a little, but he most. Something of the appealing boyishness had gone out of his eyes. He had become her contemporary. A certain moral advantage, too, had passed to his side and she, whose prerogative it had been to take the leading part, now waited for him to begin. As if on honour to do nothing abruptly, he sketched his year for her—his sports and committees, his kinsfolk and hers; their fresh, invigorating, half-made land. She listened almost in silence until he turned to her and said:

"With me, Emma, it is and always will be the same. You know that. Has anything changed with you?"

"I don't think so, Crocker. How can I tell? I'm glad you're here, in spite of the shabby trick I've played you. Let me say just that I'm heartily glad to see an old friend."

"No, I must have more than that or less. I want much more than that."

"You want too much. You want more than I can give to anybody. O! Why can't you see it all? You are alive, even here in Florence but, I, I am no longer a real person that can love or be loved. Can't you see that I am only a sensibility that absorbs the sweetness of this valley, a mere bundle of scruples and fears, a weather-cock veering with the talk of the rest of them? Think of that and take back what you have thought about me."

"Emma, you admit a need, and that is very sweet to me. You want some one to strengthen you against all this that you call the valley. Mightn't that helper be I?"

"You shan't be committed to anything so hopeless."

"It isn't as hopeless as it seems. The strength of the valley is only in its weakness, and we shall be strong together."

"I have forgotten how to be strong, for years I have only been clever."

"You'd be dull enough with me as you well know. I can do that for both. But don't talk as if there were some fate between us. There can be none except your indifference, and I believe you do care a little and will more."

"Of course, I care, Crocker, but not as you wish. You have refreshed me in this opiate air. You have represented the real country I have exchanged for this illusion, the real life I might have lived had I been braver or more fortunate. But you can have no part in what I have come to be. Go, for both our sakes."

"Not for any such reason. I can't surrender my happiness for a phrase; I can't leave you to these delusions about yourself."

"It is no delusion; I wish it were. It's in my blood and breeding. For generations my people have lived the unreal life. I am the fine flower of my race, and in coming to this valley of dreams and this no-life I am merely fulfilling a destiny—a fate, as you say—and coming to my own."

"But Emma, the worthy Verplancks?"

"No, listen to me. For generations the Verplancks have been what people expected them to be, incarnate formulas of etiquette and timid living. They took their colour from the gossiping society in which they seemed to live. They prudently married other Verplancks, cousins or cousins' cousins. They hoarded their little fortunes without increasing them, and if what they called the rabble had not peopled New York and raised the price of land, which my people were merely too stolid to sell, we should long ago have gone under in penury. We have led nobody and made nothing, but have been maintained by stronger forces and persons, toward whom we have always taken the air of doing a favour. That mistake at least I shall not make with you, Crocker. I want you to feel the full nullity of me. As I see you now I have a twinge because my great grandfather, who was a small banker, would have called yours, who was a farmer—you see I have looked you up—not 'Mister' but 'My Good Man.'"

For a moment she paused, and Crocker groped for a reply. "All this may be true, Emma," he said at last, "and yet mean very little to you and me. Besides, I'm quite willing you should call me your Good Man. In fact, I'd rather like it."

"You must take me seriously—you shall. I cannot marry. I'm married already. Dennis says I am. Come and see my bridegroom." And she fairly dragged the bewildered Crocker into her den and set him once more before the missing St. Michael.

"There he is, an incarnated weakness and fastidiousness. His hand is too delicate to draw his own sword. If he really cast out Satan, it must have been by merely staring him down. His helmet rests with no weight upon his curled and perfumed locks—his buckles are soft gold where iron should be. He represents the dull, collective, aristocratic intolerance of Heaven for the only individualist it ever managed to produce. He pretends to be a warrior and is as feminine as your St. Catherine. He is the imperturbable champion of celestial good form, and Dennis, who sees through things, says he is my spiritual husband. He is the weakest of the weak and is too strong for you, Crocker."

For a space that seemed minutes they faced each other, Emma excited, with a diffused indignation that defied impartially the missing St. Michael and the puzzled man before her; Crocker with a perplexity that renewed the old boyish expression in his eyes. He seemed to be thinking, and, as he thought, the tension of Emma's attitude relaxed, she forgot to look at the St. Michael and wondered at the even, steady patience of the big likable boy she was dismissing. She pitied him in advance for the futile argument he must be revolving. She had despatched him as in duty bound and was both sorry and glad.

But his counterplea when it came was of a disconcerting briefness and potency. He said very slowly, "Yes, I see it all. There is your spiritual husband; there are they" (indicating the valley with a sweep of a big hand), "and there are you, Emma, caught in a web of baffling and false ideas; and here am I, a real man who loves you, fearing neither the St. Michael nor them" (another gesture) "nor your doubts. I set myself, Morton Crocker, your lover, against them all and take my own so."

There was a frightened second in which his sturdy arms closed about her. There was a little shudder, as the same big hand that had defied the valley sought her head and pressed it to his shoulder. When Emma at last looked up the mockery she always carried in her eyes had given place to a new serenity, and her hand reached up timidly for his.

Crocker and Emma—we now instinctively gave him the precedence—were inconsiderate enough to remove themselves without making clear the fate of the no longer missing St. Michael. We still speculated indolently as to the nature of the afterpiece in which we assumed this ex-hero of our comedy might yet appear. Then we learned that Emma was to be married without delay from the stone manor house under the Taconics where her people had dwelt since patroon days. Only a handful of friends with Crocker's nearest kin and her inevitable New York aunts were to be present. These venerable ladies had admitted that in marrying, even opulently, out of the family, Emma had once more shown velleities of self-sacrifice. Then we heard of Crocker and Emma on his boat along the coast "Down East." Later we were shocked by rumours of a canoe trip through Canadian waterways. Hereupon the usually benevolent Dennis protested as he glanced approvingly at the well-kept Tuscan landscape. "Crocker needn't rub it in," he opined. "Why, it's the same scrubby spruce tree from the Plains of Abraham to James's Bay-and Emma, who hated being bored! Why, it's marriage by capture; it's barbaric." "It's worse; it's rheumatic," shuddered Harwood as he declined Marsala and took whisky. "But he'll have to bring her back to civilisation some time, if only to hospital. We shall have her again." "He will bring her back, but we shall never have her again," said Dennis solemnly. "She has renounced us and all our works." "Renouncing our works isn't so difficult," smiled Mrs. Dennis, and then the talk drifted elsewhere, to new Emmas who were just beginning to eat the Tuscan lotus.

Before the year had turned to June again we had nearly forgotten our runaways, when a quite unusual activity about her villa and Crocker's warned us that they were coming back. Harwood had seen in transit a box which he thought corresponded to the St. Michael's stature, but was not sure. In a few days came a circular note from Crocker through Dennis saying that they were fairly settled and he glad to see any or all of us. She, however, was still fatigued by the journey and must for a time keep her room.

Harwood straightway volunteered to undertake the preliminary reconnaissance, while Frau Stern engaged to penetrate to Emma herself.

On a beatific afternoon we sat in council on Dennis's terrace awaiting the envoys. Below, the misty plain rose on and on till it gathered into an amber surge in Monte Morello and rippled away again through the Fiesolan hills. Nearer, torrid bell-towers pierced the shimmering reek, like stakes in a sweltering lagoon. In the centre of all, the great dome swam lightly, a gigantic celestial buoy in a vaporous sea. The spell that bound us all was doubly potent that day. The sense of a continuous life that had made the dome and the belfries an inevitable emanation from the clean crumbling earth, lulled us all, and we hardly stirred when Harwood bustled in, saying, "Cheer up. I have seen Crocker, and it isn't there." "You mean," said the cautious Dennis, "that Crocker still possesses only the hole, aperture, frame, or niche that the missing St. Michael may yet adorn." "I only know that it isn't there now," growled Harwood. "I deal merely in facts, but you may get theories, if you must have them, from Frau Stern, who heroically forced her way to Emma over Crocker's prostrate form."

As he spoke we heard Frau Stern's timid, well-meaning ring, and in a moment her smile filled the archway.

"We don't need to ask if you have news," cried Mrs. Dennis from afar.

"If I haf news. Guess what it is. It is too lovely. You cannot think? Well, there will be a baby next autumn, what you call it?" "Michaelmas, I suppose," grunted Harwood through his pipe-smoke and subsided into indifference.

"All this is most charming and interesting, Frau Stern," expostulated Dennis, "but, as our enthusiastic friend Harwood delicately hints, what we really let you go for was to locate the Missing St. Michael." "I haf almost forgot that," she apologised as she nibbled her brioche, "Emma was so happy. But for the bothersome St. Michael there is no change. I saw it in what she calls her new den. She laughed to me and said, 'I cannot let him have it, you see, you would all say he married me for it.'"

"Bravo!" shouted Dennis and Harwood in unison, and the Sage added with unction, "So she has not been able to renounce us utterly."

"It is not now for long," rejoined Frau Stern, "it is only to the time we haf said." "Michaelmas," repeated Harwood disgustedly.

"Yes, that is it," she pursued tranquilly, "Emma told me in confidence, 'To Crocker I cannot give it because of you all, but to our child I may, and it shall do with it what it will.' Now do you prevail, Misters Dennis and Harwood?"

"We are a bit downcast but not discomfited," acknowledged Dennis, while Harwood remained glumly within his smoke. "Emma has escaped us, but she still pays us the tribute of a subterfuge. It is enough, we will forgive her, even if her way lies from us dozers here. For to-day the same sunshine drenches her and us. It is a bond. Let us enjoy it while we may."



THE LUSTRED POTS

"Haul away, Sam. This is the real thing" came from the depths of the well. Sam Cleghorn stumbled in the gloom towards the windlass, avoiding on the way a rude handpump and two heaps of dirt and broken pottery that sloped threateningly upon the low curb, where balanced a perforated disc of marble, the great bottom-stone of the well. All these properties caught a little light from a beam that came through a slit in the wall, casting most of its uncertain bloom up into a low groined vault, the heavy round arches of which were separated from squat piers by clumsy brackets. Outside at the level of the reticulated stone floor one could hear the rushing of a river. As Cleghorn leaned over the well-mouth before seizing the crank, a glimmer of yellow light flooded his face and again came up the hollow impatient cry, "Haul away, Sam. This lot's a good one, and it's mine." Replying "All right, Dick," Cleghorn bent to the crank. With much creaking the coils crept along the spindle and the light burden began to rise jerkily.

* * * * *

Although neither the well nor the vaulted cellar chamber belonged to Sam Cleghorn or to Dick Webb, their presence and actions there were not surreptitious. Stanton Mayhew, who ignorantly owned the well, had given them plenary permission to pump and dig, mildly pitying their apparent lunacy. The palace above was his in virtue of his sensible preference for living twice as well on the Arno for half the cost on the Hudson. This rule of two, like so many foreign residents of Florence, he unquestioningly obeyed, and it constituted practically the whole of his philosophy and maxims. Hence he was not the man to prize a Tuscan well dug in the fourteenth century, cleaned perhaps never, and gradually filled to the brim with what the forwardlooking past benightedly took for rubbish. So when Cleghorn and Webb made him an overture for the right to clean the well, he had genially replied, "Why, go ahead, boys, and enjoy yourselves. It's you who ought to be paid, but for your healths' sake you really ought to wait till I've punched some decent windows through that damp cellar wall and let the air in."

If neither Sam nor Dick waited even a day, it was because each was a bit afraid that the other would begin alone. College mates, collectors both, they were fast friends in a way and rivals beyond dispute. Their common taste for antiquity and adequacy of means had made their graduate course chiefly one of travel. And when travel wore out its novelty they naturally settled in the easiest, as the least exacting, European city, occupying two halves of one floor in the same palace. Their apartments started full, and quickly overflowed with objects of curiosity and art—all old, for their knowledge was considerable; some fine, for neither was without taste. But taste neither had in any austere sense, for they collected art much as a dredge collects marine specimens. Nothing came amiss to them. Wood, ivory, silver, bronze, marble, plaster—they repudiated no material or period. Stuffs, glass, pictures, porcelains, potteries—it was all one to them so the object were old and rare. Inevitably, then, they had come to primitive pots, and simultaneously, for they not only watched each other closely, but almost read each other's minds. And when they came to primitive pots it was certain that they would beg, borrow, or steal a well, since in old wells, and cisterns, besides less mentionable places, primitive pots abide. Many pots were there, as we shall see, from the first, and the maids and children of the centuries, by way of concealing breakages, have usually made notable secondary contributions. So when amiable Stanton Mayhew freely conceded a most ancient well to Cleghorn and Webb, it was like receiving Pandora's box, with the difference that the well might safely be opened.

Here had ensued a most delicate negotiation concerning the division of the spoil. A mathematical partition of the fragmentary material that an old Italian well contains is extremely difficult if at all possible. After much debate it was agreed that after they struck pay dirt, each should dig in turn, each to have the bucketful that came under his trowel or fingers. Scattered fragments of the same pot and other complications were to be adjudicated by Mayhew, whose ignorance and disinterestedness were safe to assume. But the well gave up quantities of noncontentious matter before Mayhew's services were required. The first five feet had revealed nothing but fragments of kitchen pottery of our time and a fairly perfect hoopskirt of Garibaldian date. A little lower had emerged the skeleton of a cat. Similar tragedies were in evidence, on an average, at every quarter century of depth. Between the second and third cat, lay Ginori imitations of Sevres and Wedgewood, scraps too of gilded glass—the earnest of better things below. Five cats down, some eighteenth-century apothecary pots, damaged but amenable to repair, had inaugurated the alternation of buckets under the agreement. It were tedious to follow the ascending scale of excellence as the digging went deeper. Enough to say that below the mixed ingredients and the nethermost cat they found a homogeneous layer of beautiful fourteenth-century shards, affording many buckets full, and promising delicate adjudication to the referee.

Before the lustred pots themselves shed a baleful gleam over this narrative, something should obviously be said about Italian wells and why they contain pots. Beyond those casually acquired from careless or secretive servants, there is, if the well be old and of good make, a certain number of intact pieces put in to serve as a filter. Often a group of pitchers or similar crocks is imprisoned between the two bottom-stones. Sometimes there are two such layers. After this filter had been made there was frequently scattered a bushel or more of small shards above. From these by careful sorting complete or nearly complete pieces may be recovered. Through all this mass of whole or broken pottery the water had to find its way up, for the cement sides of an Italian well are watertight. Thus, barring the indiscretions of housemaids and cats, the early Italians drank pure water.

Naturally Cleghorn and Webb were conversant with these refinements of mediaeval hydraulics. In fact when Webb, the sturdier of the two, hauled up the bottom-stone all dripping, Cleghorn promptly declared that in the sense of the contract it was a bucketful; hence his first go at the now uncovered pots. So heated grew the debate, that finally the grimy excavators climbed to the upper air and appealed to Mayhew, who promptly denied the quibble, deciding that stones and pots were not interchangeable. The diversion drew attention from the great perforated disc itself, and as the sullen Cleghorn let the exultant Webb down upon the ancient pots, it lay badly bestowed near the curb on the crumbling slope of a rubbish heap. And now Cleghorn with bitterness of heart was reeling up Webb's find. As the coils broadened on the windlass a small iron bucket rose above the parapet, brimming with something that glinted metallically under the dirt. Beside the bucket flapped the rude swing in which the entrances and exits of the partners were made. As Cleghorn grasped the bail and swung the precious cargo clear of the well, came up once more the voice of Webb: "Hustle, Old Man, I'm keen to see them, they feel good."

Good they were indeed. Cleghorn, who for fifteen years had haunted shops and museums had never seen the like in equal compass. As he took them cautiously one by one and held them high in the uncertain light, each revealed a desirable point. Here was a coat of arms, a date, the initial of an owner. There were grotesque birds and beasts. Differing in form and colour, the entire lot agreed in possessing that dull early Italian lustre, which perhaps accidental and less distinguished than that of Spain, is even dearer in a collector's eyes. They hinted of all enamelled things that come out of the East—of the peacock reflections of the tiles of Damascus and Cordova, of the franker polychromy of Rhodian kilns, of the subtler bloom of the dishes of Moorish Spain, of the brassier glazes of Minorca and Sicily—all these things lay enticingly in epitome in these lustred Italian pots, as they glimmered with a furtive splendour. Yes, they were a good lot, thought Cleghorn as he placed them reverently on the flagging. It was the find of a lifetime. A man with nothing else in his cupboard must be mentioned respectfully among collectors from Dan to Beersheba.

Again the impatient voice of Webb below: "Hurry up, I say. It's getting cold: the water is gaining."

"All right," called Cleghorn, giving a few strokes of the pump, but never taking his eyes from the lustred pots. Then as if by a sudden inspiration he asked, "Any more in that lot, Dick?"

"Not a one," cried Webb jubilantly, "there was just a bucketful and a squeeze at that. But there may be others beneath. There's another bottom-stone, and it's your next turn. But why don't you hurry up?"

A scowl passed over Cleghorn's thin face set unswervingly towards the pots. They glimmered in the shadow with an unholy phosphorescence—green, blue, carmine, strange purplish browns. So the glittering coils of the serpent may have bewildered our first Mother. There were other pots below, reflected Cleghorn, yes, but there never could be again such a batch as these. And then his dazed eye for a second left the fascinating pots, and mechanically searched the vaulted chamber. To his excited gaze the rubbish heaps centring about the curb seemed already in movement. The massive bottom-stone overhung the parapet, resting only on loose dirt and shards. With horror he noted that a breath might send it down. If it slipped, whose were the lustred pots? Against his will the phrase said itself over and over again throbbingly behind his eyes, and again he forgot everything in the vision of the lustred pots.

"Damn it, hurry up," came thunderously from below. Cleghorn stumbled with a curious hesitation between the crank and the poised bottom-stone. The clumsy movement loosened a handful of shards which went clattering down; the great stone slid, caught on the parapet, and hung once more in uncertain oscillation. Profanity unrestrained transpired from the mouth of the well.

It was a tremulous Cleghorn that sent down the bucket and reeled up an irate and vociferous Webb. Words abounded without explanations, and blows seemed possible, when Cleghorn, as it were apologetically raised a pitcher and a bowl into the shaft of light that came through the oubliette. "They're all like that, Dick," he protested. "It's your lucky day. I congratulate you." It was a silenced and mollified Webb that clutched at the pots, and noted wisely that every one had been brushed by the peacock's tail. With a kind of pity at last he turned to the deprecating Cleghorn and said, "That was an awkward business of yours about the shards, and the bottom-stone there is a pretty sight for a man who left it so and went down to work under it, but one couldn't wait for such pots as these. On my soul, Old Man, if you had dumped it all down on me I could hardly have blamed you."

Welcomed with a loud laugh by its maker, the joke jarred on Cleghorn, who merely answered, "It's very good of you, Dick, to say so."

"But there may be quite as good ones below," pursued Webb genially. "We'll rest up a bit and then you have your go and finish the job."

"If you don't mind, Dick, I'd rather not," was the embarrassed answer. "The fact is I'm too nervous and absentminded for this work." He looked down into the blackness with a shudder and said. "No, I don't want to go down there again. One can't tell what might happen there."

"Then you've dropped your nerve. Sorry for it," came from a baffled and disgusted partner, but as he spoke a smile drew across the broad, amiable face, and he added insinuatingly, "Then the rest are mine, Old Man?"

"Yes they're yours fast enough."

"It's mighty good of you, Sam. I won't forget it. I'll share sometime on a good thing like this. I'm all ready to go down again when you've had a smoke. Only we'll set that stone right and you'll be more careful about the shards."

"If you'll excuse me, Dick, I'd rather not." Cleghorn looked at his watch. "You see I ought to be out of these duds already. I have a very particular tea outside. Didn't I tell you about it? I'll send Mayhew down to help."

"All right, just as you please," was the indifferent reply. But as Cleghorn turned up the narrow steps, Webb muttered perplexedly, "To funk at this point and for a tea! The man is touched or in love."

* * * * *

Webb with Mayhew's dispassionate aid made a considerable haul below the second stone, though in truth there was nothing there to compare with the first lot. The batch of lustred pots is the pride of his eye, and when it is suggested that he values them highly he answers, "Well rather, they're pretty good, you know, and then they nearly cost me a broken head. I was so keen for them that I set a big stone where it might easily have tumbled on me." Then the rest of the anecdote, which Cleghorn, in whose presence it frequently is told, never hears with complete equanimity. The causes of his uneasiness I do not engage to analyse, for, unlike Webb, Cleghorn is imaginative and difficult.



THE BALAKLAVA CORONAL

As the dinner wore on endlessly, I consoled myself by the thought of the Balaklava Coronal. There in the toastmaster's seat was Morrison who had bought it, at my right loomed Vogelstein who had sold it, far across, towards the foot of the board, sat the critic Brush in whose presence I understood the infamous sale had been made. I missed only Sarafoff, the marvellous peasant-silversmith, who wrought the coronal in his prison workshop in the Viennese ghetto. Now there was nothing strange about Vogelstein's selling it, nor yet about Morrison's buying it; only the making of it by the illiterate Sarafoff and the silence of Brush when it was sold required explanation. Vogelstein, who breathed heavily beside me, undoubtedly held the secret. I felt so hopeful that time and the champagne which we were drinking for the sake of art would give him to me that I took no pains meanwhile to disturb his elaborate indifference to my presence.

Between him and me little love was lost. As the editor of a moneylosing art magazine in the interior, it was my duty occasionally to visit his galleries. After such visits the remnant of my New England conscience usually forced me to diminish or actually to spoil many a sale of the dubious or merely fashionable antiquities in which he dealt. But in the main my power to harm him was slight. He held in a knowing grip the strings of his patrons' vanity and taste. So he regarded me with something between scorn and uneasiness—as a pachyderm might take a predatory bee. For the sake of my steady production of the honey of free advertising he forgave a sting from which he was after all immune. At the beginning of the dinner he had greeted me with what was meant for a civility and then had relapsed into silence. To escape the loquacity of my other neighbour I gave myself to parallel observation of Vogelstein and Morrison—the great dealer and his greater customer.

Both plainly belonged to the same species and it pleased my whim to symbolise them as a mastodon and a rogue elephant. Morrison, the dreaded agent and operator, was unquestionably the finer creature. He moved more precisely and with a sense of wieldy power. His phrases cut where Vogelstein's merely smote. His bigness had something genial about it. He looked the amateur, and indeed does not the rogue elephant trample down villages chiefly for the joy of the affray? One felt that something more than Morrison's preposterous winnings had been involved in the clashes of railroads and cataclysms on the exchange which had for years past been his major recreation. Vogelstein, though evidently of coarser fibre, belonged to the same formidable breed. The mastodon, we must suppose, lacked much of the finesse of the rogue elephant of later evolution. And Vogelstein's Semitism was of the archaic, potent, monumental type. His abundant fat looked hard. For all the sagging double chin, his jaw retained the character of a clamp. Among the strong race of art dealers he was feared. Whole collections not single objects were his quarry. He paid lavishly, foolishly, counting as confidently on the ignorance and vanity of his clients, as ever Morrison upon the brute expansion of the national wealth. But Vogelstein looked and was as completely the professional as Morrison the amateur. There remained this essential difference that if nothing could be too big to stagger Vogelstein, nothing likewise could be too small to deter him. I knew his shop, or rather his palace, and had observed the relish with which he could shame a timorous art student into giving three prices for a print. It afforded him no more pleasure, one could surmise, to impose a false Rembrandt at six figures upon a wavering iron-master, or, indeed to unload an historic but rather worthless collection upon Morrison himself. For Vogelstein was after all of primitive stamp, to wit the militant publican. So he took toll and plenty, it mattered little where or whence.

To Morrison and Vogelstein no better foil could be imagined than Brush. If they recalled the tusked monsters that charged in the van of Asiatic armies, his analogue was the desert horse. Small, spare, sensitive, shy, his every posture suggested race, training, spirit, and docility. His flair for classical art had become proverbial. By mere touch he detected those remarkable counterfeits of Syracusan coins. It was he who segregated the Renaissance intaglios at Bloomsbury only the winter before he exposed the composite figurines at Berlin. To him the Balaklava Coronal must have proclaimed its nullity as far as its red gold could be seen. For that matter the coronal was a bye-word, and why not? The same dealers who had landed the more famous Tiara in the Louvre had the selling of it. The greater museums in Europe and America had refused it at a bargain. On Fifth Avenue and the Rue Lafitte all the dealers were joking about the Balaklava Coronal. The name of Sarafoff, its maker, had even become accepted slang. For a season we "Sarafoffed" our intimates instead of hoaxing them. And in the face of all this Vogelstein had sold the Coronal to Morrison under Brush's very nose. It seemed so wholly incredible that I began counting Vogelstein's heavy respirations, to make sure I was really awake.

Then the pale, tense mask of Brush—so isolated in the apoplectic row across the table—calmed me. That he was Vogelstein's or anyone's tool was unthinkable. Mercenary suspicions, to be sure, had been put about, but those who knew him merely laughed at such a notion. Vogelstein also laughed, shaking volcanically within, whenever the Coronal, the genuineness of which he still maintained, was mentioned. And he always treated Brush with a curious and almost tender condescension, much in fact as the mastodon might have regarded that fragile ancestor of the horse, the five-toed protohippos.

I have neglected to explain that the occasion which brought me at one table with such major celebrities as Morrison, Vogelstein, and Brush was a public dinner in behalf of civic art. For just as we find the celestial compromised by the naughty Aphrodite, so we distinguish two antithetical sorts of art. There is a bad private art which is produced for dealers and millionaires and takes care of itself, and there is a virtuous public art which we hope to have some day and meanwhile has to be taken care of by special societies. It was one of these that was now dining for the good of the cause. Under the benevolent eye of Morrison, our acting president, we had put pompano upon a soup underlaid with oysters, and then a larded fillet upon some casual tidbit of terrapins. Whereupon a frozen punch. Thus courage was gained, the consecrated sequence of sherry, hock, claret and champagne being absolved, for the proper discussion of woodcock in the red with a famous old burgundy—Morrison's personal compliment to the apostolate of civic art.

At the dessert, Morrison himself spoke a few words. The little speech came brusquely from him, and no one who knew his rapacity for the beautiful could doubt his faith in the universal superlatives he now advocated. Our art, he held, must weigh with our mills and railroads, else our life is out of balance. We never grudged millions to burrow beneath New York for light, or for drink or speed, why then should we grudge them for the beautiful inutilities that might make the surface of the city splendid. A craving for fine objects was his own dearest emotion, he wanted to see cities, states, and the nation ready to spend with equal fervour. It all came apparently to a matter of spending. Morrison entertained no doubt that an imperious demand would create an abundant supply of what he called the best art. Whether we were to transport bodily the great monuments of Europe to America, or merely were to supply beauty off our indigenous bat, was not clear from Morrison's address, and possibly was not wholly so in his own mind. But the talk was solid and forceful, and I could hear Vogelstein grunt with inward joy when he contemplated the city, the state, and the nation in their predicted role as customers. I too felt that a real if an incoherent voice had spoken, and that if civic art were indeed to come, it would be through such neo-Roman visionaries as Morrison.

Then the mood changed and a willowy, hirsute, and earnest reviver of tapestry weaving rose and pleaded for the "City Beautiful," castigating the Philistine the while, and looking forward to a time when "the pomp, and chronicle of our time should be splendidly committed to illumined window and pictured wall," with some slight allusion to "those ancient webs through which the Middle Ages still speak glowingly to us."

About midway in the speech Morrison, who had another public dinner down the avenue slipped away. As he nodded "See you later perhaps" I marked the adoring eye and smile of Vogelstein, and then the great folds settled back into their places about his mouth and my neighbour once more gave an uneasy attention to the weaver of beautiful phrases, meanwhile drinking repeated glasses of burgundy. Soon his huge form heaved with an inarticulate discontent, and as the speaker sat down amid perfunctory applause Vogelstein snorted twice into the air.

"It is rather absurd, as you say," I ventured.

"It's sickening," wheezed Vogelstein. "Why can't he sell his tapestries without all that talk?"

"Oh, he enjoys the talk and probably believes it, and you and I do better after all to hear his talk than to see his tapestries." A mastodonic chuckle welcomed this mild sally. The burgundy was taking effect.

As the diners rose stiffly or alertly, according to their several grades of repletion, Vogelstein attached himself to me almost affectionately. "Do stop in the cafe and talk to me," he urged. "It's queer, here are a lot of my customers, some of my artists, besides you literary chaps, and except Morrison, nobody wants to talk to me. Morrison and I, we understand each other. It's early yet. Come along with me and talk. I've wanted to talk to you for a long time, but always was too busy in my place. You see you writers don't buy, in fact those that know almost never do. It's really queer."

Knowing the might of burgundy when a due foundation of champagne has been laid, I hardly took this effusion as personal to myself, but I also saw no reason, too, why I should not profit by the occasion. "I'll gladly chat with you, Mr. Vogelstein," I answered, "but you must let me choose the subject. We will talk about the Balaklava Coronal."

As he led me into the elevator by the arm he whispered "All right, Old Man, but why? You know just as much as I about it."

There was no chance to reply until he had selected his table and ordered two Scotches and soda. "Yes, I know something about it," I said at last; "everyone does apparently except Morrison. I know that Sarafoff made the Coronal, but I don't know who taught him how to make it, nor yet how Morrison was idiot enough to buy it, when anybody could have told him what it was, nor yet how Brush came to let it be sold. These are the interesting parts of the story, and I'll drink no drink of yours unless you tell."

At the mention of idiocy in connection with Morrison Vogelstein shuddered and raised a massive deprecating hand. The gesture was arrested by the entrance of Brush, who with a slight nod to us passed to a distant corner. Suddenly Vogelstein's expression had become one beaming, condescending paternalism. "Good man but impracticable," he muttered. "Thinks knowing it is everything. Knowing it is something, but selling it is the real thing. Now I hardly know at all, not a tenth as much as Brush, not a half as much as you even, but so long as I can sell, I don't really care to know. What's the use?"

"But you did know about the Balaklava Coronal and you sold it too," I interrupted. "How did you dare?"

"That's my secret—but here are our drinks. A bargain's a bargain. How funny it is to be talking truth. Why, much of it would make even your job difficult."

"And yours impossible, but we're not getting to the Coronal," I insisted.

"As for that," responded Vogelstein obligingly, "the first thing was of course the making. You know all about Sarafoff yourself. Well, he only did the work. It was Schoenfeld who put in the brains. You don't know him? Few do. Great man though. University professor of archaeology, trouble with a woman, next trouble with money, now one of us. Yes Schoenfeld thought it out and saw it through."

"And certainly made a good job of it," I admitted.

"As you see, we wanted something unique—something that could not be compared with anything in the museums."

"Precisely," I interposed, "Product of the local, semi-barbaric school of the Crimea."

"You've hit it," grinned Vogelstein. "Scythian influence, to take the professors. Schoenfeld said we must have that. And that's why it had to be found at Balaklava."

"But it had to look Scythian too. How did you manage that?"

"Oh, that was Sarafoff's business. He had been a servant and then a novice at one of the monasteries of Mount Athos. Could make beautiful tenth-century Byzantine madonnas. I've sold some. Then he carved ikons in wood, ivory, silver, or what came. His things really looked Scythian enough to those who didn't know their modern Greece and Russia. So we set him to work in a back alley of Vienna at three kroners a day—double pay for him—and Schoenfeld ran down from Petersburg now and then to coach him."

"You could trust him?" I inquired, recalling how Sarafoff had subsequently won fame by confessing to his most famous forgery.

"As much as one can anybody. You see he doesn't speak any civilised language, and at that time we couldn't tell that the Tiara would spoil him as it did the entire deal."

"But Schoenfeld's coaching?" I suggested. Vogelstein here winked solemnly and drank deeply from his tall glass. "First I want to tell you all about Sarafoff," he persisted, "of course we had him watched all the same, and whenever he got an evening off, which was seldom, we had him filled up with schnapps. He was a quiet drunk which is an excellent thing, Sir." As I nodded assent to this great truth, he continued: "Yes Schoenfeld, as I was saying, managed everything. Wonderful scholar. You would respect him I'm sure. Why, every bit of the pattern of the Coronal was taken from some real antique, every word of the inscription too." "Wasn't that a bit dangerous?" "With Schoenfeld in charge, not so very. Everything was taken from little Russian museums that even you critics don't visit. Almost no published thing was used, you see."

"Then there was Sarafoff"—

"To give it all that quaint Scythian look," Vogelstein added joyously. "Yes, we had just the best brains and the best hands for the job, and it was beautiful." "Better than the Tiara?"

"Yes, far better. The Tiara was all a mistake, as I told Schoenfeld; it was too big and too good to be true. Except for Steinbach, who fell in love with its queerness and chipped in some money, we never could have sold it to a museum. And it was a bad thing to have it there, it aroused opposition, it was bound to be exposed. I was always against it, and sure enough it spoiled the game for us. But the Balaklava Coronal that was just right. It had a sort of well-bred modest beauty. We should have begun instead of ending with it. Yes, Sir, there never was a more beautiful thing, a more plausible thing, a finer object to sell than the Balaklava Coronal."

As he bellowed the word and beat the table in confirmation, Brush looked over from his corner apprehensively. "Quietly, Mr. Vogelstein," I hinted, "this is between ourselves, and we might be overheard."

"That's right," he admitted, and moodily lit another cigar. "Where were we?" he asked uneasily. "Oh yes, we were at the Tiara. Now the Coronal and what we could have sold on the strength of it was worth ten of the Tiara, and if it hadn't been for the cursed thing, we could have landed the Coronal as a starter in any one of half a dozen museums."

"As a matter of fact they were all shy of it."

"Of course. Once the Tiara was being looked into, the museum game was up, and there was only Morrison left." Vogelstein lurched around nervously. "He may drop in soon," he explained. "I'd like to make you acquainted."

Ignoring the offer, I persisted, "You've got to the interesting point at last. Tell me why there was only Morrison left. To begin with Morrison knows something about such matters, and next he can have the best advice for the asking. And yet you tell me that Morrison was the only great collector in the world to whom that notoriously false bauble could be sold."