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.