As Maurice motored down to the station, the maple and beech leaves spurned by his tires rose up in their passing glory and sang Hal’s message, over and over, with variations; and on the night train, the wheels took up the refrain, with grinding insistence. “Buyer buyer waits your wire,” though probably due in part to a mistake at the office, sounded a little like the new poetry; Maurice hoped there might be truth as well as poetry in it. “Top price cash down” had its own music, of course; but “immediate withdrawal from gallery” was less pleasing to the ear. It had implications. That part of the message, reverberated in the too sonorous breathing of lower nine, just opposite, really annoyed our painter. As he afterward told Hal, adapting his language to his hearer, “it got his goat.” “Immediate withdrawal,” indeed! Such words were not to be addressed to a Price. Emerging from the sordid practicalities of the Pullman, he sought his Club for breakfast; he felt that the morning air on his face, even in the few steps from the Grand Central to the Century, might supplement the sketchy passes he had made before the shiny Pullman basin, while lower nine, perspiring in purple pajamas, awaited his turn; lower nine, in waking as in sleeping hours, still suggesting “immediate withdrawal.” The offending phrase followed Maurice into the breakfast-room. He had eaten it in his grapefruit and was thoughtfully stirring it into his coffee, when Mr. William Saltonstall, that early bird among collectors, sauntered in, and after a moment’s hesitation, hastened to grasp his hand. Maurice in his absorption did not associate his enigmatic “buyer buyer” with Mr. Saltonstall. Indeed, that gentleman was known everywhere as a connoisseur in figure-pieces; he never bought landscapes. Yet there was something unusual in his manner; his dark melancholy eyes, usually very gentle, were smouldering with a kind of suppressed excitement, in which both joy and pain were suggested. “Surely I have the right explanation, haven’t I?” he began, with anxious courtesy. “If you have,” replied Maurice, “I wish you’d share it with me, along with breakfast.” Acting on a fantastic impulse to match another man’s perplexities with his own, he pushed the crumpled telegram across the table. Mr. Saltonstall smiled. “Oh, yes, I asked Wrayne to wire you.” A glimmer of light broke over Maurice. “Are you—by any chance—this ‘buyer buyer’?” His friend nodded nervously. “Still waiting your wire! But I don’t ask immediate withdrawal, now. That is, if the truth is what I think it is.” “But what _is_ the truth?” cried the bewildered painter. “You should know,” returned the other. “I have my belief, my strong belief!—but you, you have the knowledge! For God’s sake, man, was it a landscape or—a lady—that you sent down to that cousin of yours?”