L’esquif aborde et me depose,
       Jetant son amarre au pilier,
     Devant une facade rose,
       Sur le marbre d’un escalier.

How exquisite they were!  As one read them, one seemed to be floating down the green water-ways of the pink and pearl city, seated in a black gondola with silver prow and trailing curtains.  The mere lines looked to him like those straight lines of turquoise-blue that follow one as one pushes out to the Lido.  The sudden flashes of colour reminded him of the gleam of the opal-and-iris-throated birds that flutter round the tall honeycombed Campanile, or stalk, with such stately grace, through the dim, dust-stained arcades.  Leaning back with half-closed eyes, he kept saying over and over to himself: 

     “Devant une facade rose,
        Sur le marbre d’un escalier.”

The whole of Venice was in those two lines.  He remembered the autumn that he had passed there, and a wonderful love that had stirred him to mad delightful follies.  There was romance in every place.  But Venice, like Oxford, had kept the background for romance, and, to the true romantic, background was everything, or almost everything.  Basil had been with him part of the time, and had gone wild over Tintoret.  Poor Basil!  What a horrible way for a man to die!

He sighed, and took up the volume again, and tried to forget.  He read of the swallows that fly in and out of the little cafe at Smyrna where the Hadjis sit counting their amber beads and the turbaned merchants smoke their long tasselled pipes and talk gravely to each other; he read of the Obelisk in the Place de la Concorde that weeps tears of granite in its lonely sunless exile and longs to be back by the hot, lotus-covered Nile, where there are Sphinxes, and rose-red ibises, and white vultures with gilded claws, and crocodiles with small beryl eyes that crawl over the green steaming mud; he began to brood over those verses which, drawing music from kiss-stained marble, tell of that curious statue that Gautier compares to a contralto voice, the “monstre charmant” that couches in the porphyry-room of the Louvre.  But after a time the book fell from his hand.  He grew nervous, and a horrible fit of terror came over him.  What if Alan Campbell should be out of England?  Days would elapse before he could come back.  Perhaps he might refuse to come.  What could he do then?  Every moment was of vital importance.

They had been great friends once, five years before—­ almost inseparable, indeed.  Then the intimacy had come suddenly to an end.  When they met in society now, it was only Dorian Gray who smiled:  Alan Campbell never did.