“If you had been interested in old English silver, Mr Harris, this piece might have had some attraction,” said Sir Gilbert, drenching his flaring nostrils with a pinch of snuff from a tiny ivory spoon. “I’m no great judge myself, but my father highly prized it.” The Bond Street dealer, with a thudding heart, peered through the glass at the very counterpart of that tarnished goblet which had fetched £7000 in Sotheby’s. He was wondering if the dry, old, shabby gentleman looking over his shoulder, and odorous with macconba, was aware that this was a Tudor Cup, or if he had read the newspapers carefully and knew what Tudor Cups were worth in Sotheby’s. II. “But Himmel! did you not make him an offer?” demanded Hirsch next day in the Bond Street shop—they called it gallery—to which his partner had returned from Tweedside with the profound depression a man might have who had for a fleeting moment seen the only woman he could ever love and then had lost her in a panic. “Offer, Joel!” he replied in accents of despair. “I offered him five thousand, and he only chuckled. He would not even take it from the cupboard. ‘No, no, Mr Harris,’ he said with his head to the side, flicking up his abominable snuff; ‘it is an heirloom older than any here, and I am not selling.’ And the galling thing is that he doesn’t even know he has a Tudor Cup, nor what a Tudor Cup can fetch in Sotheby’s.” “Ah, you should have had the money with you, Harris,” said his partner. “Always show the money, I say; it talks for you through a speaking-trumpet. By heavens, I will go myself to Scotland and have that Tudor Cup, if I have to steal it!” III. A spirit of romance and a solemn homily on mutability were in the scene when Hirsch walked into the grounds of Quair, though he was not the man to understand. Six hundred years of history cried from the old bastion; still in its shelter men sowed oats, and their shabby dwellings clustered, no way changed, to look at, since the Borderland was vexed with wars and Quair was lord and warden; but vassals no more, save to that grim seigneur Commerce, who took from them triple-tithes and children instead of the service of the sword, which was all the old lords claimed. A valley of peace, and nights untroubled, and the old bold fighting Quairs in their resting graves, and their troopers’ dust at the roots of English pastures; surely at eve in the woods of Quair, or riding spirit horses through the passes of the hills, a thousand ghosts went seeking lost passions, old delights.