A little before the sensational rencontre in Emma’s den, the chance of finding a rude pilgrim woodcut on the Quai Voltaire revealed the saint’s identity.  This ugly print informed the faithful that the “prodigious image” of Our Lady existed in the Church of the Carmelites at Borgo San Liberale.  One might distinguish at the extreme right of the five compartments a willowy St. Michael in armour, like Chaucer’s Squire in a black-letter folio, or if the identification had been doubtful, there was the name below in all letters.

When the print was shown to the scheming Harwood over the afternoon vermouth, he suspended a long discourse on the contemptible fate of being born an Anglo-Saxon, and it came over him with a blessed shock that Emma had the missing St. Michael.  Penetrated by the joy of the situation, he hesitated for a moment whether to give the initiative to the man or the woman.  A glance at Crocker’s uncompromising sturdiness convinced him that on that side the situation might be quickly exhausted.  Emma he could trust to do it full justice.  Excusing himself abruptly, he made for Frau Stern’s lodgings, and with the taste of Crocker’s vermouth still in his faithless mouth, told her that Emma’s Crivelli was no other than the missing St. Michael.  To make matters sure he solemnly bound Frau Stern to secrecy.  That accomplished, he strode whistling down through the purple twilight to his well-earned fritto at Paoli’s.  The next day began our wondering what Emma would do.  She did, as is known, a thing that her simple Knickerbocker ancestresses would have approved—­presented Crocker to the St. Michael and left the decision modestly to the men.  Behind the frankness of her procedure lay, perhaps, a curiosity to see how Crocker would bear himself in a delicate emergency.  It was to be in some fashion his ordeal.  Thus she might at least shake the appalling equanimity with which he had passed from the stage of comrade to that of suppliant.  Not that she doubted him; nobody did that, but she resented a little in retrospect his silence on the subject of the great quest.  Was it possible that for these five years he had chatted only about his college pranks, his fishing trips, his orchards and vineyards, and the views?  As she reviewed their countless walks and teas, it really seemed as if he had never paid her the compliment of being impersonal.  Well, that was ended now at any rate.  A little misgiving filled her that she had never revealed the presence of the St. Michael to so good a play-fellow.  A delicacy, knowing his incorrigible zeal as a collector, had restrained her, and then, as Dennis had guessed, her den was her sanctuary, admission to which implied an intimacy difficult to concede.  Whatever the merits of the case, the rupture had produced in a milieu consumed by the desire to guess what Emma would do, at least one person who was solely interested in what Crocker’s next move might be.  For the first time in a singularly calculable life he had become an object of genuine curiosity.