"Do I know it?" replied Corancez. "I had not been here an hour before I had gone through the whole place. He is a little bit--" and he tapped his forehead significantly, pointing to the old Prince and Don Fortunato, who were going out of the gallery with Miss Marsh. "He is a little bit crazy.--But you will judge for yourself." All the procession--to use the term employed by the "representative of a great French family," as the Abbé Lagumina styled the Provençal--followed in Fregoso's wake and descended a narrow staircase leading to the private apartments of the collector. He was now leading, eager to show the way. As is often the case in big Italian mansions, the living rooms were as little as the reception halls were big. The Prince, when alone, lived in four cramped rooms, of which the scanty furniture indicated very plainly the stoicism of the old man, wrapped up in a dream-world and as indifferent to comfort as he was impervious to vanity. The twenty or twenty-five pieces that formed his museum were hung on the walls. At the first glance the Fregoso collection, celebrated all over the two hemispheres, was made up of shapeless fragments, rudely carved, that could not fail to produce the same impression upon the ignorant in such matters that Corancez had felt. Fregoso had studied antique art so closely that he now cared for nothing but statuary dating from an epoch anterior to Phidias. He worshipped these relics of the sixth century which afford glimpses of primitive and heroic Greece--the Greece that repulsed the Asiatic invasion by the simple virtue of a superior, elevated race placed face to face with the countless hordes of an inferior people. The Genoese nobleman had become the most devoted of archæologists after being one of the most active conspirators. And now he lived among the gods and heroes of that little known and distant Hellas as though he had been a contemporary of the famous soldier carved upon the stele of Aristion. The gouty old man seemed to be miraculously rejuvenated the moment the last of his guests crossed the threshold of the first chamber, which usually served him as a smoking-room. He stood erect. His feet no longer dragged upon the floor as though too heavy for his strength. His dæmon, as his beloved Athenians would have said, had entered into him and he began to talk of his collection with a fire that arrested any inclination to smile. Under the influence of his glowing language the mutilated marble seemed to become animated and to live again. He could see the figures of two thousand four hundred years ago in all their freshness. And by a species of irresistible hypnotism his imagination imposed itself upon the most sceptical among his auditors. "There," he said, "are the oldest carvings known.--Three statues of Hera, three Junos in their primitive form: that is, wooden idols copied in stone by a hand that still hesitates as though unfamiliar with the work." "The xoanon!" said Florence Marsh.