praying that to her who had given all and came naked to the shrine, love might be given, and the grace of Venus.  And when at last, after strange adventures, her prayer was granted, then when the sweet light came from the sea, and her lover turned at dawn to that bronze glory, he saw beside him a little statuette of amber.  And in the shrine, far in Britain where the black rains stained the marble, they found the splendid and sumptuous statue of the Golden Venus, the last fine robe of silk that the lady had dedicated falling from her fingers, and the jewels lying at her feet.  And her face was like the lady’s face when the sun had brightened it on that day of her devotion.

The bronze mist glimmered before Lucian’s eyes; he felt as though the soft floating hair touched his forehead and his lips and his hands.  The fume of burning bricks, the reek of cabbage water, never reached his nostrils that were filled with the perfume of rare unguents, with the breath of the violet sea in Italy.  His pleasure was an inebriation, an ecstasy of joy that destroyed all the vile Hottentot kraals and mud avenues as with one white lightning flash, and through the hours of that day he sat enthralled, not contriving a story with patient art, but rapt into another time, and entranced by the urgent gleam in the lady’s eyes.

The little tale of The Amber Statuette had at last issued from a humble office in the spring after his father’s death.  The author was utterly unknown; the author’s Murray was a wholesale stationer and printer in process of development, so that Lucian was astonished when the book became a moderate success.  The reviewers had been sadly irritated, and even now he recollected with cheerfulness an article in an influential daily paper, an article pleasantly headed:  “Where are the disinfectants?”

And then—­but all the months afterwards seemed doubtful, there were only broken revelations of the laborious hours renewed, and the white nights when he had seen the moonlight fade and the gaslight grow wan at the approach of dawn.

He listened.  Surely that was the sound of rain falling on sodden ground, the heavy sound of great swollen drops driven down from wet leaves by the gust of wind, and then again the strain of boughs sang above the tumult of the air; there was a doleful noise as if the storm shook the masts of a ship.  He had only to get up and look out of the window and he would see the treeless empty street, and the rain starring the puddles under the gas-lamp, but he would wait a little while.

He tried to think why, in spite of all his resolutions, a dark horror seemed to brood more and more over all his mind.  How often he had sat and worked on just such nights as this, contented if the words were in accord though the wind might wail, though the air were black with rain.  Even about the little book that he had made there seemed some taint, some shuddering memory that came to him across the gulf of forgetfulness.