Moving back to Rome, along the old way where had marched all the legions, by the ruins, under the blue sky, he had a sense of going with Caesar’s legions, step by step, targe by targe, and then of his footstep halting, turning out, breaking rhythm....  From this it was suddenly a winter night and at Glenfernie, and he sat by the fire in his father’s death-room.  His father spoke to him from the bed and he went to his side and listened to dying words, distilled from a wide garden that had relaxed into bitterness, growths, and trails of ideal hatred.... What was it, setting one’s foot upon an adder?...  What was the adder?

He entered the city.  His lodging was above the workroom and shop of a recoverer of ancient coins and intaglios, skilful cleanser and mender of these and merchant to whom would buy.  The man was artist besides, maker of strange drawings whom few ever understood or bought.

Glenfernie liked him—­an elderly, fine, thin, hook-nosed, dark-eyed, subtle-lipped, little-speaking personage.  No great custom came to the shop in front; the owner of it might work all day in the room behind, with only two or three peals of a small silvery summoning bell.  The lodger acquired the habit of sitting for perhaps an hour out of each twenty-four in this workroom.  He might study at the window gem or coin and the finish of old designs, or he might lift and look at sheet after sheet of the man’s drawings, or watch him at his work, or have with him some talk.

The drawings had a fascination for him.  “What did you mean behind this outward meaning?  Now here I see this, and I see that, but here I don’t penetrate.”  The man laid down his mending a broken Eros and came and stood by the table and spoke.  Glenfernie listened, the wood propping elbow, the hand propping chin, the eyes upon the drawing.  Or he leaned back in the great visitor’s chair and looked instead at the draftsman.  They were strange drawings, and the draftsman’s models were not materially visible.

To-day Glenfernie came from the noise of Rome without into this room.  His host was sitting before a drawing-board.  Alexander stood and looked.

“Are you trying to bring the world of the plane up a dimension?  Then you work from an idea above the world of the solid?”

“Si. Up a dimension.”

“What are these forms?”

“I am dreaming the new eye, the new ear, the new hand.”

Glenfernie watched the moving and the resting hand.  Later in the day he returned to the room.

“It has been a fertile season,” said the artist.  “Look!”

At the top of a sheet of paper was written large in Latin, LOVE IS BLIND.  Beneath stood a figure filled with eyes.  “It is the same thing,” said the man.

The next day, at sunset, going up to his room after restless wandering in this city, he found there from Ian another intimation of the latter’s movements: 

     GLENFERNIE,—­I am going northward.  There will be a
     month spent at monseigneur’s villa upon the Lake of Como. 
     Then France again.—­IAN RULLOCK.