Frauelein Linda Goeritz is, if something of a sentimentalist, also a bit of an analyst, and when, in the train, she learned that the spearhead was lost she accepted Hauptmann’s cheerful comment with a certain scepticism.  He insisted with a suspicious vivacity that it didn’t matter, that indeed he preferred to have the merely professional reminiscence eliminated from an experience that had personally moved him so deeply.  To this reading of the affair she naturally could not object, but as she gave him her hand quite formally for farewell, she said:  “To-night you have forgotten the runes, tomorrow you forget me, nicht wahr?  You are wrong.  Them you will not find again:  there are many of me.  You should have forgotten me first.”  She escaped while a protest was on his lips.

Since that evening Frauelein Goeritz has followed Professor Hauptmann’s brilliant career with a certain interest and perplexity.  He has ceased to be an Extraordinarius, but his promotion was based on his ingenious researches in Vandalic.  After that trip to the Certosa he discontinued all Lombard studies, and, it is said, actually withdrew from publication a scathing article in which the West Germanic contingent were handled according to their deserts.  She has a vague and not wholly comfortable feeling of having counted for something as a deterrent, and she has been heard to hint that his strange distaste for his favourite Lombard investigations, is due to a deep and intimates cause—­an unfortunate affair of the heart associated with that historic region.

THEIR CROSS

How their cross reached Fourth Avenue one may only surmise, but there surely was knavery at some point of its transit.  It was too splendid in its enamelling, too subtle in the chiselling of its gilded silver to have slipped into the byways of the antiquary’s trade with the consent of the Tuscan bishop who controlled or should have controlled its sale.  For the matter of that, it still contained one of St. Lucy’s knuckles, which in case of a regular transaction would have been transferred to a less precious reliquary.  No, there must have been a pilfering sacristan, or worse, a faithless priest, to explain its translation from the Chianti hills to Novelli’s shop in Fourth Avenue.

Once there it was certain that one day or another John Baxter must find it.  How he became infected with the collector’s greed and acquired the occult knowledge that feeds that malady it would take too long to tell.  Yet it may be said that the yearning amateur was about the only potent ingredient in the mild composite that was John Baxter.  His eyes, skin, hair, and raiment had never seemed of any particular colour, nor did he as a whole seem of any especial size.  His parents, who were neither rich nor poor, cultured nor the contrary, had sent him to an indifferent school and college.  In the latter he had joined a middling chapter of a poorish fraternity, and, was graduated with a rank that was neither high nor low.  During those four easy going years he had played halfhearted baseball and football, and had all but made the “Literary Monthly.”