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. II YOU remember old Neave, of course? Little Humphrey Neave, I mean. We used to see him pottering about Rome years ago. He lived in two tiny rooms over a wine shop, on polenta and lentils, and prowled among the refuse of the Ripetta whenever he had a few _soldi_ to spend. But you’ve been out of the collector’s world for so long that you may not know what happened to him afterward... He was always a queer chap, Neave; years older than you and me, of course--and even when I first knew him, in my raw Roman days, he gave me an extraordinary sense of age and experience. I don’t think I’ve ever known any one who was at once so intelligent and so simple. It’s the precise combination that results in romance; and poor little Neave was romantic. He told me once how he’d come to Rome. He was _originaire_ of Mystic, Connecticut--and he wanted to get as far away from it as possible. Rome seemed as far as anything on the same planet could be; and after he’d worried his way through Harvard--with shifts and shavings that you and I can’t imagine--he contrived to get sent to Switzerland as tutor to a chap who’d failed in his examinations. With only the Alps between, he wasn’t likely to turn back; and he got another fellow to take his pupil home, and struck out on foot for the seven hills.