Again he was pervaded by the haunting awareness of an elusive, poignant melancholy. His eyes moved to the spurious becket—to the discerning scrutiny of James Femms a palpable counterfeit, a thing so obvious and crude that even Kitchler, with the three originals to scream their warning, might have noticed it—not even hand-wrought groining, des Femmes pronounced, a clumsy fraud, grouted, at a guess, and bench-gammoned to trick the eye of ignorance! It seemed to des Femmes that his atrabilious depression found its focus here. He lifted himself to see more clearly; was it—could it be—that he felt the yearning of those sundered parts, the shame and longing of the _porte-chapeaux_ for that ravished becket? Had his sympathy, his passion for _noisette à cheval_ refined his perceptions to a delicacy so incredible, so splendid? He dallied wistfully with the thought and put it from him. Not even Jambes des Femmes could have attained a receptivity so exquisite. Suddenly, as the voice of the auctioneer became premonitory, James Femms moved in his chair. He remembered Sonoff! As if hours instead of years were overlaid upon the recollection he could see that _porte-chapeaux_ in Sonoff’s _entresol_, its lovely amber tone warmed by the crimson wall! It was Sonoff’s! Jambes des Femmes saw him, as he had been—Sonoff the debonair, high on the crest of his wave, Sonoff, the greatest artist of his time! And now—abruptly, ineludibly, came the thought—and now, even the art was dead! Dead. Since that day of Sonoff’s greatness men had been born, lived out their lives, died, without knowing that the art had ever lived! Jambes des Femmes tasted the bitterness of it; he saw Sonoff, behind the great _râtelier_ of bells, his hands flashing like the lustres of _bobèches_ on a girandole, from the elfin-tinkling tinniness of the soprano to the rugent clamor of the bass! Sonoff, a Russian, had taught the Swiss their place! “_Grandes fromages_,” Sonoff would say. “Let them yodel!” And now—! Sonoff, beggared, reduced to the shrewd torment of testing the timbre of telephone bells for a niggard pittance, and Sonoff’s _porte-chapeaux_, degraded and disfigured by that pinchbeck becket, going, for the last, third time to Kitchler! James Femms lifted his catalogue. II The bassines, at least, James Femms admitted, were good. Sound bronze—he stiffened as memory quickened in him. Gently his finger-nail tapped their margins and a hushed whispering resonance seemed to bring an audible perfume into the chamber. James Femms nodded. It had been Sonoff’s whimsy to have these bassines cast and toned in bell-metal—one to sound the low A flat and the other the D that Sonoff had loved best of all his bells.