his of Hippolyta--

"Naked upon her bright Numidian horse,"

for this is an imagined likeness, before he saw her, of herself. But no,
it is unrecognised; so they move to the next, which she cannot mistake,
for was it not done by her command? She had said he was to carve,
against she came, this Greek, "feasting in Athens, as our fashion was,"
and she had given him many details, and he had laboured ardently to
express her thought. . . . But still no word from her--no least, least
word; and, tenderly, at last he reproaches her--

"But you must say a 'well' to that--say 'well'!"

--for alarm is growing in him, though he strives to think it only
fantasy; she gazes too like his marble, she is too like marble in her
silence--marble is indeed to him his "very life's-stuff," but now he has
found "the real flesh Phene . . ." and as he rhapsodises a while, hardly
able to sever this breathing vision from the wonders of his glowing
stone, he turns to her afresh and beholds her whiter than before, her
eyes more wide and dark, and the first fear seizes him again--

"Ah, you will die--I knew that you would die!"--

and after that, there falls a long silence.

Then she speaks. "Now the end's coming"--that is what she says for her
first bridal words.

"Now the end's coming: to be sure it must
Have ended some time!"

--and while he listens in the silence dreadfully transferred from her to
him, the tale of Lutwyche's revenge is told at last.

We know it before Phene speaks, for Lutwyche, telling Gottlieb, has
told us; but Jules must glean it from her puzzled, broken utterance,
filled with allusions that mean nothing until semi-comprehension comes
through the sighs of tortured soul and heart from her who still is, as
it were, in a trance. And this dream-like state causes her, now and
then, to say the wrong words--the words _he_ spoke--instead of those
which had "cost such pains to learn . . ."

This is the story she tries to tell. Lutwyche had hated Jules for long.
There were many reasons, but the chief was that reported judgment of the
"crowd of us," as "dissolute, brutalised, heartless bunglers." Greatly,
and above all else, had Jules despised their dissoluteness: how could
they be other than the poor devils they were, with those debasing habits
which they cherished? "He could never," had said Lutwyche to Gottlieb,
"be supercilious enough on that matter. . . . _He_ was not to wallow in
the mire: _he_