ld have smiled again--smiled
delicately, as he had then smiled at her. "Has it been his motive in
letting me have you?"

"Yes, my dear, positively--or in a manner," she had said.

"American City isn't, by the way, his native town, for, though he's not
old, it's a young thing compared with him--a younger one. He started
there, he has a feeling about it, and the place has grown, as he says,
like the programme of a charity performance. You're at any rate a part
of his collection," she had explained--"one of the things that can only
be got over here. You're a rarity, an object of beauty, an object of
price. You're not perhaps absolutely unique, but you're so curious and
eminent that there are very few others like you--you belong to a class
about which everything is known. You're what they call a morceau de
musee."

"I see. I have the great sign of it," he had risked--"that I cost a lot
of money."

"I haven't the least idea," she had gravely answered, "what you
cost"--and he had quite adored, for the moment, her way of saying it. He
had felt even, for the moment, vulgar. But he had made the best of that.
"Wouldn't you find out if it were a question of parting with me? My
value would in that case be estimated."

She had looked at him with her charming eyes, as if his value were well
before her. "Yes, if you mean that I'd pay rather than lose you."

And then there came again what this had made him say. "Don't talk about
ME--it's you who are not of this age. You're a creature of a braver and
finer one, and the cinquecento, at its most golden hour, wouldn't have
been ashamed of you. It would of me, and if I didn't know some of the
pieces your father has acquired, I should rather fear, for American
City, the criticism of experts. Would it at all events be your idea," he
had then just ruefully asked, "to send me there for safety?"

"Well, we may have to come to it."

"I'll go anywhere you want."

"We must see first--it will be only if we have to come to it. There are
things," she had gone on, "that father puts away--the bigger and more
cumbrous of course, which he stores, has already stored in masses, here
and in Paris, in Italy, in Spain, in warehouses, vaults, banks, safes,
wonderful secret places. We've been like a pair of pirates--positively
stage pirates, the sort who wink at each other and say 'Ha-ha!' when
they come to where their treasure is buried. Ours is buried pretty well
everywhere--except what we like to s