he goddess in the glowing mist of her hair, praying that to her
who had given all and came naked to the shrine, love might be given, and
the grace of Venus. And when at last, after strange adventures, her
prayer was granted, then when the sweet light came from the sea, and her
lover turned at dawn to that bronze glory, he saw beside him a little
statuette of amber. And in the shrine, far in Britain where the black
rains stained the marble, they found the splendid and sumptuous statue of
the Golden Venus, the last fine robe of silk that the lady had dedicated
falling from her fingers, and the jewels lying at her feet. And her face
was like the lady's face when the sun had brightened it on that day of
her devotion.

The bronze mist glimmered before Lucian's eyes; he felt as though the
soft floating hair touched his forehead and his lips and his hands. The
fume of burning bricks, the reek of cabbage water, never reached his
nostrils that were filled with the perfume of rare unguents, with the
breath of the violet sea in Italy. His pleasure was an inebriation, an
ecstasy of joy that destroyed all the vile Hottentot kraals and mud
avenues as with one white lightning flash, and through the hours of that
day he sat enthralled, not contriving a story with patient art, but rapt
into another time, and entranced by the urgent gleam in the lady's eyes.

The little tale of _The Amber Statuette_ had at last issued from a humble
office in the spring after his father's death. The author was utterly
unknown; the author's Murray was a wholesale stationer and printer in
process of development, so that Lucian was astonished when the book
became a moderate success. The reviewers had been sadly irritated, and
even now he recollected with cheerfulness an article in an influential
daily paper, an article pleasantly headed: "Where are the disinfectants?"

And then--but all the months afterwards seemed doubtful, there were only
broken revelations of the laborious hours renewed, and the white nights
when he had seen the moonlight fade and the gaslight grow wan at the
approach of dawn.

He listened. Surely that was the sound of rain falling on sodden ground,
the heavy sound of great swollen drops driven down from wet leaves by the
gust of wind, and then again the strain of boughs sang above the tumult
of the air; there was a doleful noise as if the storm shook the masts of
a ship. He had only to get up and look out of the window and he would see