It was particularly hard for him that evening.  The Duchess was dining with a party at Madame Steynlin’s; it was an open secret that the entertainment would end in a moonlight excursion on the water; she would not return till very late.  Angelina would be alone, accessible.  It was her duty to guard the house in the absence of its mistress.  He might have gone there on some pretext and talked awhile, and looked into her elvish eyes and listened to that Southern voice, rich and clear as a bell.  Almost he yielded.  He thought of the ineptitude of the whole undertaking and, in particular, of those slippery stairs; one might break one’s neck there at such an hour of the night.  Unless one wore tennis shoes—­

Well, he would wear them.  He would resist the temptation and approve himself a man.  Everybody, even the Duchess, was always telling him to be a man.  He would find himself.  Keith was right.

The night came.

He descended noiselessly into the cool and dark chasm, resting awhile on a ledge about half-way down, to drink in the spirit of the place.  All was silent.  Dim masses towered overhead; through rifts in the rocky fabric he caught glimmerings, strange and yet familiar, of the landscape down below.  It swam in the milky radiance of a full moon whose light streamed down from some undiscoverable source behind the mountain, suffusing the distant vineyards and trees with a ghostly tinge of green.  Like looking into another world, he though; a poet’s world.  Calmly it lay there, full of splendour.  How well one could understand, in such a place, the glamour, the romance, of night!  Romance. . . .  What was left of life without romance?  He remembered his talk with Marten; he thought of the scientists crude notions of romance.  He pitied the materialism which denied him joys like these.  This moonlit landscape—­how full of suggestion!  That grotto down below—­what tales it could unfold!

The Cave of Mercury. . . .

How had Mercury, the arch-thief, come to be presiding genius here?  Denis knew; his friend Eames had explained everything to him.  Mercury had nothing whatever to do with the site.  That name had been proved by the bibliographer to be the invention of some pedantic monk who liked to display his learning to a generation avid of antiquities, a generation which insisted on attaching a Roman deity to every cavern.  It was a wilful fabrication, made in the infancy of archaeology when historical criticism was non-existent.  And the same with all those stories about human sacrifices and tortures.  There was not a word of truth in them.  So Mr. Eames had decided, after a systematic investigation of both of the older authorities and of the grotto itself.  The legends, too, were simply invented to give a zest to a locality whose original antique name had apparently been lost, though he had not yet abandoned all hope of stumbling across it by one of those lucky accidents which reward the lover of old parchments and title-deeds.  A pure invention.  It was plain the Mr. Eames from what remained of ancient symbols on the spot, that the cave had been consecrated to older and worthier rites—­to some mysterious, primeval, fecund Mother of Earth.  Her name, like that of her habitation, had lapsed into oblivion.