At this moment, in the month of May, 190—­, Edmund Melrose had just passed his seventieth birthday.  But the extraordinary energy and vivacity of his good looks had scarcely abated since the time when, twenty-three years before this date, Netta Smeath had first seen him in Florence; although his hair had whitened, and the bronzed skin of the face had developed a multitude of fine wrinkles that did but add to its character.  His aspect, even on the threshold of old age, had still something of the magnificence of an Italian captain of the Renaissance, something also of the pouncing, peering air that belongs to the type.  He seemed indeed to be always on the point of seizing or appropriating some booty or other.  His wandering eyes, his long acquisitive fingers, his rapid movements showed him still the hunter on the trail, to whom everything else was in truth indifferent but the satisfaction of an instinct which had grown and flourished on the ruins of a man.

As they drove along, through various portions of the Tower estates, the eyes of the taciturn driver beside him took note of the dilapidated farm buildings and the broken gates which a miserly landlord could not be induced to repair, until an exasperated tenant actually gave notice.  Melrose meanwhile was absorbed in trying to recover a paragraph in the Times he had caught sight of on a first reading, and had then lost in the excitement of studying the prices of a sale at Christie’s, held the day before, wherein his own ill luck had led to the bad temper from which he was suffering.  He tracked the passage at last.  It ran as follows: 

“The late Professor William Mackworth has left the majority of his costly collections to the nation.  To the British Museum will go the marbles and bronzes, to the South Kensington, the china and the tapestries.  Professor Mackworth made no stipulations, and the authorities of both museums are free to deal with his bequests as they think best.”

Melrose folded the newspaper and put it back into his pocket with a short sudden laugh, which startled the man beside him.  “Stipulations!  I should rather think not!  What museum in its senses would accept such piffling stuff with any stipulations attached?  As it is, the greater part will go into the lumber-rooms; they’ll never show them!  There’s only one collection that Mackworth ever had that was worth having.  Not a word about that.  People don’t give their best things to the country—­not they.  Hypocrites!  What on earth has he done with them?  There are several things I want.”