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.”