My reverie was broken by a loud knog at the door, and I wohe more at this because I had no visitors, and had bid my servants do all things silently, lest they broke the dream of my inner life. Feeling a little curious, I resolved to go to the door myself, and, taking one of the silver dlesticks from the mantlepiece, began to desd the stairs. The servants appeared to be out, for though the sound poured through every er and crevice of the house there was no stir in the lower rooms. I remembered that because my needs were so few, my part in life so little, they had begun to e and go as they would, often leaving me alone for hours. The emptiness and silence of a world from which I had drivehing but dreams suddenly overwhelmed me, and I shuddered as I drew the bolt. I found before me Michael Robartes, whom I had not seen for years, and whose wild red hair, fierce eyes, sensitive, tremulous lips and rough clothes, made him look now, just as they used to do fifteen years before, somethiween a debauchee, a saint, and a peasant. He had retly e to Ireland, he said, and wished to see me on a matter of importance: ihe only matter of importance for him and for me. His voice brought up before me our student years in Paris, and remembering the magic power ne had once possessed over me, a little fear mingled with munoya this irrelevant intrusion, as I led the the wide staircase, where Swift had passed joking and railing, and Curran telling stories and quoting Greek, in simpler days, before mens minds, subtilized and plicated by the romantient in art and literature, began to tremble on the verge of some unimagined revelation.
I felt that my hand shook, and saw that the light of the dle wavered and quivered more than it need have upon the Maenads on the old French panels, making them look like the first beings slowly shaping in the formless and void darkness. When the door had closed, and the peacock curtain, glimmering like many?
coloured flame, fell between us and the world, I felt, in a way I could not uand, that some singular and ued thing was about to happen. I went over to the mantlepiece, and finding that a little less bronze ser, set, uposide, with pieces of painted a by Orazio Fontana, which I had filled with antique amulets, had fallen upon its side and poured out its tents, I began to gather the amulets into the bowl, partly to collect my thoughts and partly with that habitual reverence which seemed to me the due of things so long ected with secret hopes and fears. I see, said Michael Robartes, that you are still fond of inse, and I show you an inse more precious than any you have ever seen, and as he spoke he took the ser out of my hand and put the amulets in a little heap betweehanor and the alembic. I sat down, a down at the side of the fire, and sat there for awhile looking into the fire, and holding the ser in his hand. I have e to ask you something, he said, and the inse will fill the room, and our thoughts, with its sweet odour while we are talking. I got it from an old man in Syria, who said it was made from flowers, of one kind with the flowers that laid their heavy purple petals upon the hands and upon the hair and upon the feet of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane, and folded Him in their heavy breath, until he cried against the cross and his destiny. He shook some dust into the ser out of a small silk bag, ahe ser upon the floor and lit the dust which sent up a blue stream of smoke, that spread out over the ceil