Chapter I

“WHAT’S become of the Daunt Diana? You mean to say you never heard the sequel?”

Ringham Finney threw himself back into his chair with the smile of the collector who has a good thing to show. He knew he had a good listener, at any rate. I don’t think much of Ringham’s snuff-boxes, but his anecdotes are usually worth while. He’s a psychologist astray among _bibelots_, and the best bits he brings back from his raids on Christie’s and the Hotel Drouot are the fragments of human nature he picks up on those historic battle-fields. If his _flair_ in enamel had been half as good we should have heard of the Finney collection by this time.

He really has--queer fatuous investigator!--an unusually sensitive touch for the human texture, and the specimens he gathers into his museum of heterogeneous memories have almost always some mark of the rare and chosen. I felt, therefore, that I was really to be congratulated on the fact that I didn’t know what had become of the Daunt Diana, and on having before me a long evening in which to learn. I had just led my friend back, after an excellent dinner at Foyot’s, to the shabby pleasant sitting-room of my _rive-gauche_ hotel; and I knew that, once I had settled him in a good arm-chair, and put a box of cigars at his elbow, I could trust him not to budge till I had the story.