her, cruel yet indifferent, indolent and passionate, cold yet sensual; unnatural secrets dwelt in his mind, and mysterious crimes, and a lust for the knowledge that was arcane.  Oliver Haddo was attracted by all that was unusual, deformed, and monstrous, by the pictures that represented the hideousness of man or that reminded you of his mortality.  He summoned before Margaret the whole array of Ribera’s ghoulish dwarfs, with their cunning smile, the insane light of their eyes, and their malice:  he dwelt with a horrible fascination upon their malformations, the humped backs, the club feet, the hydrocephalic heads.  He described the picture by Valdes Leal, in a certain place at Seville, which represents a priest at the altar; and the altar is sumptuous with gilt and florid carving.  He wears a magnificent cope and a surplice of exquisite lace, but he wears them as though their weight was more than he could bear; and in the meagre trembling hands, and in the white, ashen face, in the dark hollowness of the eyes, there is a bodily corruption that is terrifying.  He seems to hold together with difficulty the bonds of the flesh, but with no eager yearning of the soul to burst its prison, only with despair; it is as if the Lord Almighty had forsaken him and the high heavens were empty of their solace.  All the beauty of life appears forgotten, and there is nothing in the world but decay.  A ghastly putrefaction has attacked already the living man; the worms of the grave, the piteous horror of mortality, and the darkness before him offer naught but fear.  Beyond, dark night is seen and a turbulent sea, the dark night of the soul of which the mystics write, and the troublous sea of life whereon there is no refuge for the weary and the sick at heart.

Then, as if in pursuance of a definite plan, he analysed with a searching, vehement intensity the curious talent of the modern Frenchman, Gustave Moreau.  Margaret had lately visited the Luxembourg, and his pictures were fresh in her memory.  She had found in them little save a decorative arrangement marred by faulty drawing; but Oliver Haddo gave them at once a new, esoteric import.  Those effects as of a Florentine jewel, the clustered colours, emerald and ruby, the deep blue of sapphires, the atmosphere of scented chambers, the mystic persons who seem ever about secret, religious rites, combined in his cunning phrases to create, as it were, a pattern on her soul of morbid and mysterious intricacy.  Those pictures were filled with a strange sense of sin, and the mind that contemplated them was burdened with the decadence of Rome and with the passionate vice of the Renaissance; and it was tortured, too, by all the introspection of this later day.

Margaret listened, rather breathlessly, with the excitement of an explorer before whom is spread the plain of an undiscovered continent.  The painters she knew spoke of their art technically, and this imaginative appreciation was new to her.  She was horribly fascinated by the personality that imbued these elaborate sentences.  Haddo’s eyes were fixed upon hers, and she responded to his words like a delicate instrument made for recording the beatings of the heart.  She felt an extraordinary languor.  At last he stopped.  Margaret neither moved nor spoke.  She might have been under a spell.  It seemed to her that she had no power in her limbs.