ique Florentine ring in the form of a small
emerald moth. I particularly noticed it as of very unusual pattern. I
recollected seeing one of the same design in the Louvre Museum in
Paris several years before.

"Ah!" he sighed. "I shall very soon leave London again--thank
goodness! Next week I return to Fiesole for the winter. I am no great
lover of London--are you, Mr.--Mr. Garfield?"

"My business as an electrical engineer keeps me in London," was my
reply. "Besides, I have recently sustained a very heavy financial
loss. If, however, I were independent I should certainly live in the
country. London has, to me, become unbearable since the war."

"Ah! I quite agree," replied my host. "All our fine British traditions
seem to have gone by the board. That, at least, is my own view. But
there--perhaps I am getting an old fogey."

"I don't think so," I replied. "Everyone who knows you, Mr. De Gex, is
well aware of your up-to-dateness, and your great generosity."

"Are they?" he asked, smiling wearily. "Personally I care very little.
Popularity and prosperity can be manufactured by any shrewd
press-agent employed at so much a year. Without publicity, the
professional man or woman would never obtain a hearing. These are the
days when incompetency properly boomed raises the incompetent to
greatness--and even to Cabinet rank. Neither would the society woman
ever obtain a friend without her boom," he went on. "Bah! I'm sick of
it all!" he added with a sweep of his thin white hand. "But it is
refreshing to talk with you, a stranger."

He was certainly frank in his criticisms, and I was not at all
surprised when he commenced to question me as to my profession, where
I lived, and what were my future plans.

I told him quite openly of my position, and that I lived in Rivermead
Mansions with my friend Hambledon; and I also mentioned again the
financial blow I had just received.

"Well," he said lazily, "I'm greatly indebted to you, Mr. Garfield,
for deigning to come in and see a much-worried man. Ah! you do not
know how I suffer from my wife's hatred of me. My poor little Oswald.
Fancy abandoning him in order that the police might find him. But
happily he is back. Think of the publicity--for the papers would have
been full of my son being lost." Then, after a pause, he added: "I
hope we shall see each other again before I go back to Italy."

At that moment, the butler, Horton, entered with a card upon a silver
salver, whereup