I long to talk with some old lover's ghost

Who died before the god of Love was born.

-John Donne,Love's Deitie

So intent was Frank upon solving the puzzle of Lemarchand's box that he didn't hear the great bell begin to ring. The device had been constructed by a master craftsman, and the riddle was this-that though he'd been told the box contained wonders, there simply seemed to be no way into it, no clue on any of its six

black lacquered faces as to the whereabouts of the pressure points that would disengage one piece of this three-dimensional jigsaw from another.

Frank had seen similar puzzles-mostly in Hong Kong, products of the Chinese taste for making metaphysics of hard wood-but to the acuity and technical genius of the Chinese the Frenchman had brought a perverse logic that was entirely his own. If there was a system to the puzzle, Frank had failed to find it. Only after several hours of trial and error did a chance juxtaposition of thumbs, middle and last fingers bear fruit: an almost imperceptible click, and then-victory!-a segment of the box slid out from beside its neighbors.

There were two revelations.

The first, that the interior surfaces were brilliantly polished. Frank's reflection-distorted,

fragmented-skated across the lacquer. The second, that Lemarchand, who had been in his time a maker of singing birds, had constructed the box so that opening it tripped a musical mechanism, which began to tinkle a short rondo of sublime banality.

Encouraged by his success, Frank proceeded to work on the box feverishly, quickly finding fresh alignments of fluted slot and oiled peg which in their turn revealed further intricacies. And with each solution-each new half twist or pull-a further melodic element was brought into play-the tune counterpointed and developed until the initial caprice was all but lost in ornamentation.