' startin' right now!"

He paused at the entry to the arch and looked back at the windows
again.

"Honorable word!" he repeated bitterly, nursing his injured wrist.
"Wouldn't that jar you?"

He moved out through the gale slowly and painfully.

XI

THE CONNOISSEUR

The office of the machine-tool agency, where Mr. Baruch sat bowed and
intent over his desk, was still as a chapel upon that afternoon of
early autumn; the pale South Russian sun, shining full upon its
windows, did no more than touch with color the sober shadows of the
place. From the single room of the American Vice-Consulate, across
the narrow staircase-landing without, there came to Mr. Baruch the
hum of indistinguishable voices that touched his consciousness
without troubling it. Then, suddenly, with a swell-organ effect, as
though a door had been flung open between him and the speakers, he
heard a single voice that babbled and faltered in noisy shrill anger.

"Out o' this! Out o' this!" It was the unmistakable voice of Selby,
the vice-consul, whose routine day was incomplete without a quarrel.
"Call yourself an American you? Coming in here."

The voice ceased abruptly. Mr. Baruch, at his desk, moved slightly
like one who disposes of a trivial interruption, and bent again to
the matter before him. Between his large, white hands, each decorated
with a single ring, he held a small oblong box, the size of a
cigar-case, of that blue lacquer of which Russian craftsmen once
alone possessed the secret. Battered now by base uses, tarnished and
abraded here and there, it preserved yet, for such eyes as those of
Mr. Baruch, clues to its ancient delicacy of surface and the glory of
its sky-rivaling blue. He had found it an hour before upon a
tobacconist's counter, containing matches, and had bought it for a
few kopeks; and now, alone in his office, amid his catalogues of
lathes and punches, he was poring over it, reading it as another man
might read poetry, inhaling from it all that the artist, its maker,
had breathed into it.

There was a telephone at work in the Vice-Consulate now a voice
speaking in staccato bursts, pausing between each for the answer. Mr.
Baruch sighed gently, lifting the box for the light to slide upon its
surface. He was a large man, nearing his fiftieth year, and a quiet
self-security a quality of being at home in the world was the chief
of his effects. Upon the wide spaces of his face, the little and neat
features were grouped