In the end he became an authority on ceramic art by the simple process of knowing more about it than anybody else.  When the trustees of the Harvard Gallery of Fine Arts awoke to that fact, he was an assistant professor of Greek in the University.  Under his care, in the new position they offered him, a collection was formed of great celebrity and value; but nothing in it was ever quite so dear to him as the modest treasures he had acquired for himself in the days of his young enthusiasm, when his fellow-countrymen as yet cared for none of these things.  As Olivia sat and talked her eye traveled absently from barbaric Rouen cornucopias and cockatoos to the incrusted snails and serpents of Bernard Palissy, resting long on a flowered jardiniere by Veuve Perrin, of Marseilles.  She had little technical knowledge of the objects surrounding her, but she submitted to the strange and soothing charm they never failed to work on her—­the charm of stillness, of peace, as of things which, made for common homely uses, had passed beyond that stage into an existence of serenity and loveliness.

“When you spoke the other day,” she said, after the conversation had turned directly on her father’s affairs—­“when you spoke the other day about a pillar of cloud, I suppose you meant what one might call—­an overruling sense of right.”

“That might do as one definition.”

“Because in that case you may like to know that I think I’ve seen it.”

“I thought you would if you looked for it.”

“I didn’t look for it.  It was just—­there!”

“It’s always there; only, as in the case of the two disciples on the Emmaus road, our eyes are holden so that we don’t see it.”

“I should have seen it easily enough; but if you hadn’t told me, I shouldn’t have known what it was.  I didn’t suppose that we got that kind of guidance nowadays.”

“The light is always shining in darkness, dearie; only the darkness comprehendeth it not.  That’s all there is to it.”

He sat at his desk, overlooking the embankment and the curves of the Charles.  It was a wide desk littered with papers, but with space, too, for some of the favorite small possessions that served him as paper-weights—­a Chinese dragon in blue-green enamel, a quaintly decorated cow in polychrome Delft, a dancing satyr in biscuit de Sevres.  On the side remote from where he sat was a life-size bust of Christ in fifteenth-century Italian terra-cotta—­the face noble, dignified, strongly sympathetic—­once painted, but now worn to its natural tint, except where gleams of scarlet or azure showed in the folds of the vesture.  While the old man talked, and chiefly while he listened, the fingers of his large, delicately articulated hand stroked mechanically the surfaces of a grotesque Chinese figure carved in apple-green jade.  It was some minutes before Olivia made any response to his last words.  “Things are very dark to me,” she confessed, “and yet this light seems to me absolutely positive.  I’ve had to make a decision that would be too frightful if something didn’t seem to be leading me into the Street called Straight, as papa says.  Did you know Mr. Davenant had offered to pay our debts?”