s were for himself only, and for the few dealers or experts to
whom he chose to show them. And the more hugger-mugger they were, the
less he should be pestered to let people in to see them. Occasionally he
would rush up to London to attend what he called a "high puff sale"--or
to an auction in one of the northern towns, and as he always bought
largely, purchases kept arriving, and the house at the end of the winter
was in a scarcely less encumbered and disorderly condition than it had
been at the beginning. The few experts from the Continent or America,
whom he did admit, were never allowed a word of criticism of the
collections. If they ventured to differ from Melrose as to the
genuineness or the age of a bronze or a marble, an explosion of temper
and a speedy dismissal awaited them.

One great stroke of luck befel him in February which for a time put him
in high good-humour. He bought at York--very cheaply--a small bronze
Hermes, which some fifteenth-century documents in his own possession,
purchased from a Florentine family the year before, enabled him to
identify with great probability as the work of one of the rarest and most
famous of the Renaissance sculptors. He told no one outside the house,
lest he should be plagued to exhibit it, but he could not help boasting
of it to Netta and Anastasia.

"That's what comes of having _an eye_! It's worth a thousand guineas of
it's worth a penny. And those stupid idiots let me have it for twenty-two
pounds!"

"A thousand guineas!" Gradually the little bronze became to Netta the
symbol of all that money could have bought for her--and all she was
denied; Italy, freedom, the small pleasures she understood, and the
salvation of her family, now in the direst poverty. There were moments
when she could have flung it passionately out of the window into the
stream a hundred feet below. But she was to find another use for it.

March arrived. And one day Anastasia came to tell her mistress that she
had received orders to pack Mr. Melrose's portmanteaus for departure.

Netta brooded all day, sitting silent and pale in the window-seat, with
some embroidery which she never touched on her knee. Outside, not a sign
of spring! A bitter north wind was blowing which had blanched all colour
from the hills, and there was ice on the edges of the streams. Thyrza was
away in Carlisle, helping an aunt. There was no one in the house but Mrs.
Dixon, and a deaf old woman from one of the labourer's