Mr. Grew paused, and for a long time Ronald sat motionless, his elbows on the table, his face dropped on his hands.

Suddenly Mr. Grew’s touch fell on his shoulder.

“Look at here, Ronald Grew—do you want me to tell you how you’re feeling at this minute? Just a mite let down, after all, at the idea that you ain’t the romantic figure you’d got to think yourself... Well, that’s natural enough, too; but I’ll tell you what it proves. It proves you’re my son right enough, if any more proof was needed. For it’s just the kind of fool nonsense I used to feel at your age—and if there’s anybody here to laugh at it’s myself, and not you. And you can laugh at me just as much as you like...”

THE DAUNT DIANA

I

“WHAT’S become of the Daunt Diana? You mean to say you never heard the sequel?”

Ringham Finney threw himself back into his chair with the smile of the collector who has a good thing to show. He knew he had a good listener, at any rate. I don’t think much of Ringham’s snuff-boxes, but his anecdotes are usually worth while. He’s a psychologist astray among bibelots, and the best bits he brings back from his raids on Christie’s and the Hotel Drouot are the fragments of human nature he picks up on those historic battle-fields. If his flair in enamel had been half as good we should have heard of the Finney collection by this time.

He really has—queer fatuous investigator!—an unusually sensitive touch for the human texture, and the specimens he gathers into his museum of heterogeneous memories have almost always some mark of the rare and chosen. I felt, therefore, that I was really to be congratulated on the fact that I didn’t know what had become of the Daunt Diana, and on having before me a long evening in which to learn. I had just led my friend back, after an excellent dinner at Foyot’s, to the shabby pleasant sitting-room of my rive-gauche hotel; and I knew that, once I had settled him in a good arm-chair, and put a box of cigars at his elbow, I could trust him not to budge till I had the story.

II

YOU remember old Neave, of course? Little Humphrey Neave, I mean. We used to see him pottering about Rome years ago. He lived in two tiny rooms over a wine shop, on polenta and lentils, and prowled among the refuse of the Ripetta whenever he had a few soldi to spend. But you’ve been out of the collector’s world for so long that you may not know what happened to him afterward...

He was always a queer chap, Neave; years older than you and me, of course—and even when I first knew him, in my raw Roman days, he gave me an extraordinary sense of age and experience. I don’t think I’ve ever known any one who was at once so intelligent and so simple. It’s the precise combination that results in romance; and poor little Neave was romantic.