And over the tea-cups in that tranquil room, while outside the cars and taxis purred and hooted up and down the slope of Saint James’s Street, she told her story. Long before she had done, Desmond, nursing his knee, his eyes fixed on the speaker’s face, had let his cigarette go out as it dangled from his lips. “I expect your brother has told you,” she said, “that I’m a collector of enamels. I guess it’s a kind of hobby of mine. Every time a special piece comes up for sale in London or Paris or Vienna, one of the dealers is pretty sure to notify me, and if it’s any way possible, I go along and see it. “Well, the other day a dealer friend of mine called me on the ’phone and told me that a Russian ikon—you know, one of these sacred pictures you see in Russian homes and churches—was to be sold at Blackie’s. It was a beautiful piece, he said, with the figures of the Madonna and Child in green-and-blue enamel under a silver sheeting—probably twelfth or thirteenth century work. He thought it would fetch under a hundred pounds and wanted to bid for me. But I like auctions and I said I’d go myself. I went into Blackie’s the day before the sale and fell in love with the ikon at once. It was quite small, not above about nine inches by six, I guess, and heavy for its size, the silver covering cut out so as to show the enamel figures underneath—you know the way it is—black with age. “Well, yesterday was the day of the sale, and Süsslein, my little dealer, went along with me. The ikon was part of the collection of some Russian Count—I forget the name—one of the _émigrés_ from the Russian Revolution who had served with Denikin against the Bolsheviks. We sat there all through the afternoon and by the time the ikon came up the hall was three-quarters empty. “One of the dealers started the bidding at ten guineas, and between three or four of us we ran it up to seventy-five. Then the others began to drop out, and by the time we’d got to a hundred there were only three of us left—Harris, who buys for Lord Boraston, me, and a funny-looking little runt of a man with a grey chin-beard and spectacles. He wasn’t one of the ordinary dealers, so I sent Süsslein to find out just who he was. When he came back he whispered to me he was a man called Achille Saumergue, who was believed to be a Frenchman. Nobody had ever seen him before. “At two hundred guineas we topped Harris’s limit, and he passed away, leaving me and old Saumergue to it. He and I kept on quietly tossing the ball to and fro until—I’m cutting this all short, you know—I brought him up all standing with an advance of fifty guineas on his three hundred and fifty. I jumped the price up a bit because Hermann, the auctioneer, who’s an old friend of mine, kept looking at the clock, and I knew the poor man was dying to shut down and go home.