striking up the sand in swirling clouds about us.
"Whew!" I whistled, covering my face against the cut of that fine shot. "We're in for a gale, yes? I say—"
But I was shocked to dumbness by the look of strained and unadulterated horror on old Mr. Twining's face. He was breathing hard and backing into the house as though driven against the storm.
"A bad night," he muttered; "wind and a sea. . . . It was just such a night—" He rediscovered me with a start and with something approaching relief, I thought.
"But you couldn't stay out in this," he reasoned, more to himself than to me; "it then becomes necessary—Sir,"—he slipped easily into the role of courteous host—"will you accept the shelter of my roof until the storm passes?"
He waited for me to precede him into the house, saw me seated in the only comfortable chair in the dim living-room, and, having first excused himself, sat down at his workbench and again took up his brush.
Slowly the room darkened. The old man forgot me and relapsed into mutterings, quivering under each shrill onslaught of the wind, pausing to listen for the moan of the surf below.
"You're deucedly close to this cliff," I ventured once, when a shower of sand swished against the window-pane.
"Eh—the cliff? Some winter nights she'll rise up to the very house and drench the glass of my windows—the sea will," he shuddered. "She's eating back—eating back; forty years ago, when I first came here, there was a front yard."
"But isn't it unsafe?"
"Perhaps," vaguely.
So he worked on until he could no longer see, and then he lit a candle, and turned to the tracing of a pattern from the colored plate of book. There were several similar volumes at his elbow, and I dared to take one up and run it through. They were, as I had guessed, plates of the more famous Greek vases—mostly those of the red-figured period. "Douris—Euphronios—Hieron," I read aloud; "oh, and those exquisite old white lekythoi!"
The effect upon the old man was instantaneous. Those names—Hieron, white lekythoi—were the magic passwords to him! He turned to me as a starved dog might turn to food:
"Ah, you know them—the cup-painters!" And he loosed upon me such a flood of scientific enthusiasm and technicalities and dates, with such an undercurrent of reverence and love for the pure beauty of these old vases, as left me breathless, feeling that I had at last found a scientist and a poet rolled into one.
"You know, you know!" he exulted. "Now you recall the Douris Athena—"
"But I know nothing, really," I interrupted him, impelled to honesty by his own intense sincerity. "My knowledge of the classics is general. We deal only in period stuff at the House of Harrow, where I'm a buyer—English and French periods mostly—for a Fifth Avenue clientele. Oh, I once dipped into Greek art on my own account, picked up the patter, but beyond that—"
He would not have it.
"You speak the language," he insisted. "And do you know that it is nearly half a century since I've talked to anyone who speaks my own tongue—nearly half a century since I've met a man who's ever heard of Euphronios, the master cup-painter? Lord, how it takes me back!"
The old man laughed. The storm and his terrors were forgotten; the glow in his heart burned up in his cheeks like a fever.
"This—these books,"—his hand swept the colored plate,—"they're all I have left—the only link I allow myself."
"Do you mean—? With your passion for the classics, you shut yourself up alone here—starve yourself! But in God's name, man, why?"
"That's why—in God's name." The old man's head was bowed; for a moment the pain was back on his face. But that brittle zest flamed up in him again. "You questioned about my Athena! You are the first man who would comprehend. Wait!"
Smiling like a child with a secret, he tiptoed to a chest of drawers, brought out something wrapped in tissue paper. Very tenderly he unwound the papers, and produced before me the broken half of a red-figured cylix, with one handle attached but with the standard missing. He waited triumphantly for my exclamation.
"Why," I said lamely, "the interior is that same Athena with her flute player. It seems—a very fine fragment—"
"Fine!"—he scorned the adjective. "Fine! Sir, this is the best of its kind—the aristocrat of the Greek vase. See!—The finished lines went something like this."
He caught up a pencil, laid the fragment flat on a sheet of white paper, and completed the broken figures of the Athena and the youth. I noted his hands as he sketched: fine, long-fingered hands, nervous, but sure at their work.
"You see?" he asked. "Now on the exterior of the cylix we have Athena mounting her quadriga after the battle. Is it not a contrast, that peaceful Athena and this Athena? Is he not, indeed, an artist of variety, the man who could do those two things, each so perfectly? You will note the horses—the bold, vigorous lines—the power and swing. It is naked, masculine drawing this—yes, scriptural. Euphronios—" Old Twining broke off, returned to his more precise exposition: "The other half of the cup—the exterior—showed Athena sending her spear into the giant Ankelados—"
"But where is the other half?" I wondered. "You must have seen it, since you hold the answer to the riddle."
"Yes," he returned slowly, "I have seen it; God knows I do hold the answer to the riddle. . . ."
But he came back to me—or rather to the beloved fragment of the cylix.
"The coloring!" he breathed. "That deep orange glow and the velvet-black and that fine gloss over all. . . . The secret of Greek potters, buried with them. Perfect to the very eyelashes. . ."
Sitting there, he lost himself in reverent admiration of the shard. He did not touch it—it was as though the fragment were too precious to handle; but he gave his soul to it through his eyes. He was oblivious to the wail of a rising wind and the thunder of a rising surf.
"It is," he announced quietly at last, "the half of a genuine, unpublished Euphronios."
I stared. "You say this is—an unpublished Euphronios?"
"Yes. The signature was on the other piece."
"But man alive, given that other piece,—and you must know where it is to be so familiar with it—this fragment is worth a king's ransom. A genuine whole Euphronios—why, the museums alone, bidding against each other—"
"The other half is gone," spoke the old man; "gone forever. But this piece itself is still worth more than a king's ransom; not in gold, but in the coin of knowledge—the knowledge it will give the world of Greek art."
His gray eyes widened to a vision; the poet was drowned in the farseeing scientist.
For that instant I felt myself in the presence of nobility—but the old man's dignity was abruptly shattered. With the rush as of an oncoming engine, the full blast of an Atlantic gale struck us: screamed and whined and groaned, and shook the old house until it rattled like a bag of loose bones.
