The bassines, at least, were possible under James Femms’s roof. But the _porte-chapeaux_ itself, with a fraudulent becket? James Femms negated the suggestion with a resolute, peremptory movement of his head. He set his shoulder to the task of thrusting the piece before him to the open porch. He closed the door upon it. Except for the bassines, it would have been better, after all, to let Kitchler have it; perhaps, even now, he could let Kitchler persuade him to part with it—not too easily, of course; it would be simple to pick up another pair of bassines, in place of these. There were two in Reading, Femms remembered, and, he thought, another pair in a junk-shop on the edge of Camden. Yes, he would let Kitchler have it, at a price. He lifted the two bassines and brought their edges softly together, inclining his head to catch the moonlit fragrance of their conjoined note. He carried them to his bedroom; he would keep them here, on either side of the Benjamin Harrison bureau. He set them on the twin plackets that jutted out from the mirror-frame. III Sleep eluded James Femms. Isolated in umbrageous stillness, the grosser sensory reactions no longer obstructed the reception of what, he now conceded, must be the telepathic apperceptions of sixth or seventh sense. Below the coverlet his body, resentful under mysterious reproaches from without, expressed its unrest in gyratory saltations; his mind ached and quivered in sympathy with baffling emotions of which his awareness was so acute that it all but equalled experience itself. He was cognizant, dimly but with certitude, of a relation between these sufferings and the presence, the propinquity, at least, of the _porte-chapeaux_ that had been Sonoff’s. Again he contemplated the hypothesis that understanding and affection had established between James Femms and the inanimate objects of his passion, a _rapprochement_, a _rapport_ analogous to, if not identical with, the sympathy that unites the sundered halves of a spiritual union. Below, from the doorstep, the _porte-chapeaux_ of Mikail Sonoff seemed, to James Femms, to upraise a muted ululation, a sound of exquisite desire, as pitiful and penetrant as the call of the widowed wood-dove. He came, at last, to the window, a panel of translucent pressed glass surrounded by a bordure of plaquettes, each of a different primary color, now delicately diminished in the pallor of a moon as cold, Femms thought, as the belly facet of a flounder. He slept with the window, after the mode which he sensed intuitively would have been that of Jambes des Femmes, closed. Lifting it, now, and shivering in the humid inrush of nocturnal airs, he identified the crooning note; the leprous, unchaste cry of feline concupiscence. Femms’s sibilant ejaculation motivated a flitting shadow; the gashed silence seemed to lick its wounds; there was stillness, but not, for James Femms, peace. [Illustration: