James Femms remembered that it was Sonoff’s quaint pronunciation of his detested name that had first suggested the thought of changing it, in his secret meditations, to the softened grace, the Parisian flavor, of Jambes des Femmes. A rush of gratitude welled in him. “Sonoff—I have guessed.” He laid his hand horizontally above the pocket where he carried his priceless stylograph, filigreed in the very flower of the Rutherford B. Hayes manner. “It is the heart that aches. And I have found the cure. Come!” Silently he led the antique _sonneur_ through the _entresol_ and to the porch. “There!” He flung his hand in a wide, fine gesture. Sonoff blinked. “_Mon porte-chapeaux._” He spoke with no zest, no vestige of his quondam _joie de vivre_. “I tired of it, Jambes.” “Take it. I give it back to you!” James Femms repeated the wide arc of his flourish. “But I no longer want it.” Sonoff shook his head and raised a hand to it as if in sudden pain. “I wear no ’at, mon brave Jambes. The pain—ah!” Again his features were intorted. “You won’t take it?” James Femms disbelieved. Surging up in his consciousness, innegable, compelling, he felt that conviction of mute, poignant yearning for reunity which had obsessed him from the first. “I cannot. It saddens me to behold it. It stirs, _mon vieux_, memories. Ah—the pain—the pain.” He pressed spatulate fingers to his temples and a groan forced passage between his teeth. “It comes back to me at the sight.” “It makes your head ache—the _porte-chapeaux_?” James Femms regarded him incredulously. [Illustration: THE BECKET (ACTUAL SIZE) Note 1. The perfect hand-wrought groining. Note 2. Observe the accurate spleening of the old handicraftsmen. ] “But yes. It was then that they began, the headaches—the night that the becket lost itself. I woke, that day, happy; they had listened, _enfin_, those adder-deaf imbeciles of the telephone; the bells were tuned at last to the F sharp; I was free from the ignominy of the E—— I sang, that day, my friend. I was _gaie_! I laughed as I snatched up my hat from the becket where, of old habit, I had hung it. Lightly, as a schoolboy is light, I placed it on my head; I tilted it; I was myself, the self that took them by storm that night in Philadelphia when I rang the overture from ‘Wilhelm Tell,’ using my feet for the _basso profundo_! All day among my new bells I was that self. And at night, returning with song in my heart and a tin of caviare and a _carache_ of vodka below my arms, I was that self. But ah, when I would have slept—the pain—the pain, mon Jambes! I shudder at the thought of it! I walked the floor in torment, as how often I have walked it since.” He pressed his temples again. “And it was while I walked that I observed the vanishment of the becket. It was gone. I do not know where, nor how—I only know that the sight of the _porte-chapeaux_ was hateful. I could not endure to behold it. I sold it, and the pain, if no less, was easier to bear.”