two in the morning
It was a vase of the K'angshi Period , a rare and beautiful specimen among the Lang Yao monochromes . And history said that thirty years before it had been purchased from the sixth Prince of Pekin , and had always been known as `` The Flame . '' Both Anthony Gubtill and I had bid for that vase . Our contest for it had been a spirited one , and had even been made the subject of a paragraph or two in the morning papers . But an inexplicably reckless mood had overtaken that parsimonious old collector , and he had won , though the day after the Graves sale I had been a member of that decorously appreciative dinner party which had witnessed its installation between a rather valuable peach-bloom amphora of haricot-red groundwork , with rose spots accentuated by the usual clouds of apple-green , and a taller and , to my mind , much more valuable ashes-of-roses cylindrical Lang Yao with a carved ivory base . We had looked on the occasion as somewhat of an event , for such things naturally are not picked up every day . So the mere sight of the vase took me back to the Gubtill home , to that rich and spacious house on lower Fifth Avenue where I had spent not a few happy evenings .