A bronze statuette, green with age, stood on a pedestal before them.

“How kind of you to come and see me!” said the Italian.  “Pray make yourself as comfortable as you can, though these chairs, I fear, are not of the latest design.  You are going to do me the honour, are you not, of sharing my simple luncheon?  Mr. van Koppen is staying too.”

“Very good of you!”

“Delighted to make your acquaintance,” said the millionaire.  “Keith was talking about you only yesterday—­such nice things!  Do stay.  Count Caloveglia has been touching on most interesting subjects—­I would come from the other end of the world to listen to him.”

The Count, manifestly shy of these praises, interrupted by asking: 

“What do you think of that bronze, Mr. Heard?”

It was an exquisite little thing.

Perfect to the finger-tips and glowing in a lustrous patina of golden-green, the Locri Faun—­so-called from the place of its discovery—­was declared to be stamped with the hall-mark of individual distinction which the artificers of old Hellas contrived to impress upon every one of the rare surviving bronzes of its period.  It was perhaps the finest of the whole group.  No wonder the statue had created wild excitement among the few, the very few, discreet amateurs who had been permitted to inspect the relic prior to its clandestine departure from the country.  And much as they might deplore the fact that it was probably going to adorn the museum of Mr. Cornelius van Koppen, an alien millionaire, not one of them found it in his heart to disapprove Count Caloveglia’s action.  For they all liked him.  Every one liked him.  They all understood his position.  He was a necessitous widower with a marriageable daughter on his hands, a girl whom everybody admired for her beauty and charm of character.

Mr. van Koppen, like all the rest, knew what hard times he had gone through; how, born of an ancient and wealthy family, he had not hesitated to sell his wonderful collection of antiques together with all but a shred of his ancestral estates, in order to redeem the gambling debts of a brother.  That amounted to quixotism, they declared.  They little realized what anguish of mind this step had cost him, for he concealed his true feelings under a cloak of playful worldliness.  Excess of grief, he held, is an unlovely thing—­not meet to be displayed before men.  All excess is unlovely.  That was Count Caloveglia’s classic point of view.  Measure!  Measure in everything.

People revered him, above all else, for his knowledge in matters of art.  His connoisseurship was not one of mere learning; it was intuitional.  Astonishing tales were told of him.  By the sense of touch alone, and in the dark, he could appraise correctly any piece of plastic work you liked.  He had a natural affinity with such things.  They held it quite likely that the blood of Praxiteles or his compeers may still have flowed through his veins—­certain