“This house is full of costly objects.  So are all his other houses, so is his place in Paris—­that mysterious Pavilion hidden away in Passy somewhere.”

Mills knew the Pavilion.  The wine had, I suppose, loosened his tongue.  Blunt, too, lost something of his reserve.  From their talk I gathered the notion of an eccentric personality, a man of great wealth, not so much solitary as difficult of access, a collector of fine things, a painter known only to very few people and not at all to the public market.  But as meantime I had been emptying my Venetian goblet with a certain regularity (the amount of heat given out by that iron stove was amazing; it parched one’s throat, and the straw-coloured wine didn’t seem much stronger than so much pleasantly flavoured water) the voices and the impressions they conveyed acquired something fantastic to my mind.  Suddenly I perceived that Mills was sitting in his shirt-sleeves.  I had not noticed him taking off his coat.  Blunt had unbuttoned his shabby jacket, exposing a lot of starched shirt-front with the white tie under his dark shaved chin.  He had a strange air of insolence—­or so it seemed to me.  I addressed him much louder than I intended really.

“Did you know that extraordinary man?”

“To know him personally one had to be either very distinguished or very lucky.  Mr. Mills here . . .”

“Yes, I have been lucky,” Mills struck in.  “It was my cousin who was distinguished.  That’s how I managed to enter his house in Paris—­it was called the Pavilion—­twice.”

“And saw Dona Rita twice, too?” asked Blunt with an indefinite smile and a marked emphasis.  Mills was also emphatic in his reply but with a serious face.

“I am not an easy enthusiast where women are concerned, but she was without doubt the most admirable find of his amongst all the priceless items he had accumulated in that house—­the most admirable. . . "

“Ah!  But, you see, of all the objects there she was the only one that was alive,” pointed out Blunt with the slightest possible flavour of sarcasm.

“Immensely so,” affirmed Mills.  “Not because she was restless, indeed she hardly ever moved from that couch between the windows—­ you know.”

“No.  I don’t know.  I’ve never been in there,” announced Blunt with that flash of white teeth so strangely without any character of its own that it was merely disturbing.

“But she radiated life,” continued Mills.  “She had plenty of it, and it had a quality.  My cousin and Henry Allegre had a lot to say to each other and so I was free to talk to her.  At the second visit we were like old friends, which was absurd considering that all the chances were that we would never meet again in this world or in the next.  I am not meddling with theology but it seems to me that in the Elysian fields she’ll have her place in a very special company.”

All this in a sympathetic voice and in his unmoved manner.  Blunt produced another disturbing white flash and muttered: