s Italian work of the
fifteenth century. Another cope was of green velvet, embroidered with
heart-shaped groups of acanthus-leaves, from which spread long-stemmed
white blossoms, the details of which were picked out with silver thread
and coloured crystals. The morse bore a seraph's head in gold-thread
raised work. The orphreys were woven in a diaper of red and gold silk,
and were starred with medallions of many saints and martyrs, among whom
was St. Sebastian. He had chasubles, also, of amber-coloured silk, and
blue silk and gold brocade, and yellow silk damask and cloth of gold,
figured with representations of the Passion and Crucifixion of Christ,
and embroidered with lions and peacocks and other emblems; dalmatics of
white satin and pink silk damask, decorated with tulips and dolphins and
_fleurs de lys_; altar frontals of crimson velvet and blue linen; and
many corporals, chalice-veils, and sudaria. In the mystic offices to
which such things were put, there was something that quickened his
imagination.

For these treasures, and everything that he collected in his lovely
house, were to be to him means of forgetfulness, modes by which he could
escape, for a season, from the fear that seemed to him at times to be
almost too great to be borne. Upon the walls of the lonely locked room
where he had spent so much of his boyhood, he had hung with his own
hands the terrible portrait whose changing features showed him the real
degradation of his life, and in front of it had draped the
purple-and-gold pall as a curtain. For weeks he would not go there,
would forget the hideous painted thing, and get back his light heart,
his wonderful joyousness, his passionate absorption in mere existence.
Then, suddenly, some night he would creep out of the house, go down to
dreadful places near Blue Gate Fields, and stay there, day after day,
until he was driven away. On his return he would sit in front of the
picture, sometimes loathing it and himself, but filled, at other times,
with that pride of individualism that is half the fascination of sin,
and smiling with secret pleasure, at the misshapen shadow that had to
bear the burden that should have been his own.

After a few years he could not endure to be long out of England, and
gave up the villa that he had shared at Trouville with Lord Henry, as
well as the little white walled-in house at Algiers where they had more
than once spent the winter. He hated to be separated from the pictu