ld
declare aloud, "Nobody has anything better than this, no museum,
certainly no mere millionaire."

Such days and nights had fed an already inordinate craving. He burned
for the beautiful things just beyond his grasp, suffered for them amid
his morning moralisings, dreamt of them at night. His was never the
disinterested love of the beautiful that certain lucky collectors retain
through all the sordidness of the quest. Had you observed John in the
auction room you would have felt something concentratedly feline in his
attitude and would hardly have been surprised had he pounced bodily upon
a fine object as it passed near him down the aisle. No other ghost of
the auction rooms--and strange enthusiasts they are, had an eye that
gleamed with so ominous a fire. There is peril in turning even a weak
will into a narrow channel. It may exert amazing pressures--like the
slender column of mere water that lifts a loaded car to, or with bad
direction, through, the roof.

* * * * *

Whether we should call John Baxter's courtship and marriage a digression
or the culmination of his career as a collector might have remained
doubtful were it not for the cross in Fourth Avenue. When he found it,
hardly a week before he met Miriam Trent, he naturally did not take it
for a touchstone. That it was in a manner such, may be inferred from the
fact that the anxious morning before the wedding, he stopped at Novelli's
for a last look, a ceremony strangely parodying the bachelor supper of
more ordinary bridegrooms. After a lingering survey of its deep
translucent enamels penned within crisply chiselled silver, like tiny
lakes rimmed by ledges, he handed the cross back to the reverent Novelli.
It had never looked more desirable, he barely heard Novelli's genial
congratulation on the coming of the great day, as he wondered how so
splendid a rarity had stayed in that little shop for two years. On
reflection the reason was simple. The price, six hundred dollars, was a
shade high for another dealer to pay, while the cross itself was so fine
an object as merely to excite the distrust of Novelli's average
customers. "Fools," muttered John, "how little they know," and hurried
towards the florist's. As he made his way back towards an impressive
frock-coat, his first, he found himself recalling with a certain
satisfaction that even if this were not his wedding day, he really never
could have hoped to buy the cross.

What