afternoons as these glowing with gorgeous
sunlight. Thus when the hall door was open, many a passer-by literally
stopped to stare and gasp; for he looked down a perspective of rich
apartments to something really like a transformation scene in a fairy
play: purple clouds and golden suns and crimson stars that were at once
scorchingly vivid and yet transparent and far away.

Leonard Quinton, the poet, had himself most carefully arranged this
effect; and it is doubtful whether he so perfectly expressed his
personality in any of his poems. For he was a man who drank and bathed
in colours, who indulged his lust for colour somewhat to the neglect
of form--even of good form. This it was that had turned his genius
so wholly to eastern art and imagery; to those bewildering carpets
or blinding embroideries in which all the colours seem fallen into a
fortunate chaos, having nothing to typify or to teach. He had attempted,
not perhaps with complete artistic success, but with acknowledged
imagination and invention, to compose epics and love stories reflecting
the riot of violent and even cruel colour; tales of tropical heavens
of burning gold or blood-red copper; of eastern heroes who rode with
twelve-turbaned mitres upon elephants painted purple or peacock green;
of gigantic jewels that a hundred negroes could not carry, but which
burned with ancient and strange-hued fires.

In short (to put the matter from the more common point of view), he
dealt much in eastern heavens, rather worse than most western hells; in
eastern monarchs, whom we might possibly call maniacs; and in eastern
jewels which a Bond Street jeweller (if the hundred staggering negroes
brought them into his shop) might possibly not regard as genuine.
Quinton was a genius, if a morbid one; and even his morbidity appeared
more in his life than in his work. In temperament he was weak and
waspish, and his health had suffered heavily from oriental experiments
with opium. His wife--a handsome, hard-working, and, indeed, over-worked
woman objected to the opium, but objected much more to a live Indian
hermit in white and yellow robes, whom her husband insisted on
entertaining for months together, a Virgil to guide his spirit through
the heavens and the hells of the east.

It was out of this artistic household that Father Brown and his friend
stepped on to the door-step; and to judge from their faces, they stepped
out of it with much relief. Flambeau had known Quinton in wi