Mrs. Blakeney’s bag held a key, with which she opened a highboy, gleaming discreetly from a nook just beyond the fireplace. Its shelves were laden with treasure; and Flickey, although long inured to the surprises that a collector can spring upon his family, exclaimed with joy before those marshalled riches. For Felicia, like her father before her, was fated to pursue beauty; even her girlish mistakes—her collection of athletic collegians, for example, her amethystine earrings, her overwrought, overworking dinner-ring in all its preposterousness—resulted from her thirst after loveliness rather than from her vanity. Jimmy himself was to her largely one last pure product of the beautiful. In Mrs. Blakeney’s drawing-room, before the highboy and its spoils, her eyes filled with tears of thankfulness for beauty. She felt that the ranks of silver vessels beaming and gleaming upon her had in some mysterious way gathered into themselves and greatly multiplied all over their surfaces all possible beauty from all known worlds, only to reflect it back upon those who were fortunate enough to be near. Not only the faded rose of the hangings and the dim gray of the panelling and the dusky orange outline of the spinet were reflected winkingly from those silver shapes; it seemed to her that the very fragrance of the pinks and the breath of summer itself were wafted to her by silver voices. Flickey sometimes passed for flippant; but this was not her flippant day. Indeed, she was startled out of a mood that was partly pleasure and partly prayer by Aunt Amanda’s matter-of-fact remark,— “My French stuff, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. I keep it locked because—oh, well, there are just a few trifles—Jimmy, reach me down that top piece, will you, please? The one at the right of the alms basin.” With a certain grave excitement, Mrs. Blakeney had already placed Felicia’s drawing upon a little table; she smoothed out the folds of the paper, especially those that crossed the lacelike handles. Then, with but a casual glance at the delicately wrought bowl that Jimmy put into her hands, she set it, with dramatic exactness, over the outline traced by the child Lydia. Each one of the trio felt for a moment the touch of a bygone day. There could be no doubt whatever that the lost piece of silver was found. Unless, indeed, as the young lawyer’s mind profanely suggested, those old boys made such things by the gross, like the green spectacles that Moses bought! But the surmise was too grotesque for utterance. Even with his slender knowledge of the silversmith’s art, he could discern that the Fairlee porringer was no machine-made product. It had been created by many touches, but by few hands; perhaps by only one pair of hands, and that a master’s. Felicia’s eyes (not wholly untrained, however subject to occasional error) rested admiringly, even reverently, on a master-craftsman’s work.