“Yes they’re yours fast enough.”

“It’s mighty good of you, Sam.  I won’t forget it.  I’ll share sometime on a good thing like this.  I’m all ready to go down again when you’ve had a smoke.  Only we’ll set that stone right and you’ll be more careful about the shards.”

“If you’ll excuse me, Dick, I’d rather not.”  Cleghorn looked at his watch.  “You see I ought to be out of these duds already.  I have a very particular tea outside.  Didn’t I tell you about it?  I’ll send Mayhew down to help.”

“All right, just as you please,” was the indifferent reply.  But as Cleghorn turned up the narrow steps, Webb muttered perplexedly, “To funk at this point and for a tea!  The man is touched or in love.”

* * * * *

Webb with Mayhew’s dispassionate aid made a considerable haul below the second stone, though in truth there was nothing there to compare with the first lot.  The batch of lustred pots is the pride of his eye, and when it is suggested that he values them highly he answers, “Well rather, they’re pretty good, you know, and then they nearly cost me a broken head.  I was so keen for them that I set a big stone where it might easily have tumbled on me.”  Then the rest of the anecdote, which Cleghorn, in whose presence it frequently is told, never hears with complete equanimity.  The causes of his uneasiness I do not engage to analyse, for, unlike Webb, Cleghorn is imaginative and difficult.

THE BALAKLAVA CORONAL

As the dinner wore on endlessly, I consoled myself by the thought of the Balaklava Coronal.  There in the toastmaster’s seat was Morrison who had bought it, at my right loomed Vogelstein who had sold it, far across, towards the foot of the board, sat the critic Brush in whose presence I understood the infamous sale had been made.  I missed only Sarafoff, the marvellous peasant-silversmith, who wrought the coronal in his prison workshop in the Viennese ghetto.  Now there was nothing strange about Vogelstein’s selling it, nor yet about Morrison’s buying it; only the making of it by the illiterate Sarafoff and the silence of Brush when it was sold required explanation.  Vogelstein, who breathed heavily beside me, undoubtedly held the secret.  I felt so hopeful that time and the champagne which we were drinking for the sake of art would give him to me that I took no pains meanwhile to disturb his elaborate indifference to my presence.

Between him and me little love was lost.  As the editor of a moneylosing art magazine in the interior, it was my duty occasionally to visit his galleries.  After such visits the remnant of my New England conscience usually forced me to diminish or actually to spoil many a sale of the dubious or merely fashionable antiquities in which he dealt.  But in the main my power to harm him was slight.  He held in a knowing grip the strings of his patrons’ vanity and taste.