Meanwhile, what was Neave doing?  For a long time I didn’t hear, and chance kept me from returning to Rome.  But one day, in Paris, I ran across a dealer who had captured for a song one of the best Florentine bronzes in the Daunt collection—­a marvellous plaquette of Donatello’s.  I asked him what had become of it, and he said with a grin:  “I sold it the other day,” naming a price that staggered me.

“Ye gods!  Who paid you that for it?”

His grin broadened, and he answered:  “Neave.”

“_ Neave?_ Humphrey Neave?”

“Didn’t you know he was buying back his things?”

“Nonsense!”

“He is, though.  Not in his own name—­but he’s doing it.”

And he was, do you know—­and at prices that would have made a sane man shudder!  A few weeks later I ran across his tracks in London, where he was trying to get hold of a Penicaud enamel—­another of his scattered treasures.  Then I hunted him down at his hotel, and had it out with him.

“Look here, Neave, what are you up to?”

He wouldn’t tell me at first:  stared and laughed and denied.  But I took him off to dine, and after dinner, while we smoked, I happened to mention casually that I had a pull over the man who had the Penicaud—­and at that he broke down and confessed.

“Yes, I’m buying them back, Finney—­it’s true.”  He laughed nervously, twitching his moustache.  And then he let me have the story.

“You know how I’d hungered and thirsted for the real thing—­you quoted my own phrase to me once, about the ‘ripe sphere of beauty.’  So when I got my money, and Daunt lost his, almost at the same moment, I saw the hand of Providence in it.  I knew that, even if I’d been younger, and had more time, I could never hope, nowadays, to form such a collection as that.  There was the ripe sphere, within reach; and I took it.  But when I got it, and began to live with it, I found out my mistake.  It was a mariage de convenance—­there’d been no wooing, no winning.  Each of my little old bits—­the rubbish I chucked out to make room for Daunt’s glories—­had its own personal history, the drama of my relation to it, of the discovery, the struggle, the capture, the first divine moment of possession.  There was a romantic secret between us.  And then I had absorbed its beauties one by one, they had become a part of my imagination, they held me by a hundred threads of far-reaching association.  And suddenly I had expected to create this kind of intense personal tie between myself and a roomful of new cold alien presences—­things staring at me vacantly from the depths of unknown pasts!  Can you fancy a more preposterous hope?  Why, my other things, my own things, had wooed me as passionately as I wooed them:  there was a certain little bronze, a little Venus Callipyge, who had drawn me, drawn me, drawn me, imploring me to rescue her from her unspeakable surroundings in a