f the South.

Artois rested his arms on the balustrade.

The ristorante was nearly full now, gay with lights and with a tempest
of talk. The waiter came to ask if the Signore would take coffee.

Artois hesitated a moment, then shook his head. He realized that his
nerves had been tried enough in these last days and nights. He must let
them rest for a while.

The waiter went away, and he turned once more towards the sea. To-night
he felt the wonder of Italy, of this part of the land and of its people,
as he had not felt it before, in a new and, as it seemed to him, a
mysterious way. A very modern man and, in his art, a realist, to-night
there was surely something very young alert within him, something of
vague sentimentality that was like an echo from Byronic days. He felt
over-shadowed, but not unpleasantly, by a dim and exquisite melancholy,
in which he thought of nature and of human nature pathetically, linking
them together; those singing voices with the stars, the women who leaned
on balconies to listen with the sea that was murmuring below them, the
fishermen upon that sea with the deep and marvellous sky that watched
their labors.

In a beautiful and almost magical sadness he too was one with the night,
this night in Italy. It held him softly in its arms. A golden sadness
streamed from the stars. The voices below expressed it. The fishermen's
torches in the Bay, those travelling lights that are as the eyes of the
South searching for charmed things in secret places, lifted the sorrows
of earth towards the stars, and they were golden too. There was a joy
even in the tears wept on such a night as this.

He loved detail. It was, perhaps, his fault to love it too much. But now
he realized that the magician, Night, knew better than he what were the
qualities of perfection. She had changed Naples into a diaper of jewels
sparkling softly in the void. He knew that behind that lacework of
jewels there were hotels, gaunt and discolored houses full of poverty,
shame, and wickedness, galleries in which men hunted the things
that gratify their lusts, alleys infected with disease and filth
indescribable. He knew it, but he no longer felt it. The glamour of the
magician was upon him. Perhaps behind the stars there were terrors,
too. But who, looking upon them, could believe it? Detail might create
a picture; its withdrawal let in upon the soul the spirit light of the
true magic.

It was a mistake to search too much, to dra