And yet how small the distance they had gone afield, how soon annihilated! Up St. James's Street went the cab, alongside the Green Park, and in a few minutes it had pulled up in Grosvenor Place. Wyndham sprang out with a forced alertness, and helped his companion to descend. The house was quite dark. Lady Betty led the way to the door-step and produced a latch key from her purse. Wyndham stood by, strained and nervous. "You must come in to receive your souvenir," she said. "You have well deserved it," she added with a brave smile. He followed her in as she pushed the door open; then she switched on the light. "You had best wait in the dining-room, I shall join you again presently." Wyndham stood alone in the spacious room, with a sense of chill and desolation. The thought of his marriage and life to come flashed on him with a stroke of terror. Suddenly he shivered. Ah, it was bleak here in this deadly, all-pervading stillness. The very lights seemed to flood the room mournfully. How tired he was! Everything seemed to swim before him. And then he was aware she was in the room again, smiling at him and exhibiting a package. Her presence seemed to revive him. "At last I am to be enlightened," he murmured. "I am afraid you are doomed to be disappointed," she said, as she came and stood by his side at the table. "I have made such a mystery of it, whereas, no doubt, you will find it trivial." "You said it was a weird idea. I am sure it is a charming one. Whatever it is, you know what it will be to me." "I know, darling," she said, suddenly grave again. She bade him cut the string and open the package. At last, as he was removing the many wrappings, "It is an old door-knocker," she said; "the figure of a lovely grotesque old wizard, wrought in bronze. I came across it on the door of a fifteenth-century house in Delft a year or two ago, and it so fascinated me that I bargained for it with the owner. It has ever since remained one of my pet possessions, and I at once thought of it for you. Tell me truly what you think of it!" Wyndham held up the strange bronze man, slim and long, with fantastic bearded head, and grasping in one hand a rod that merged into a huge serpent that lay coiled round the body. The two legs were welded at the bottom into one big foot, the heel of which formed the hammer. It was a piece of grotesqueness worthy of the East, finely and subtly modelled, and quaint rather than grim in its suggestiveness. "A masterpiece!" he said at last. "I have never seen anything of the kind to match it." "I should say it is by an artist of at any rate the early renaissance," she ventured, her face agleam, for she had awaited his verdict with anxiety. "The modelling is so careful and scientific."