the green steaming mud; he began to brood over those verses which,
drawing music from kiss-stained marble, tell of that curious statue that
Gautier compares to a contralto voice, the "_monstre charmant_" that
couches in the porphyry-room of the Louvre. But after a time the book
fell from his hand. He grew nervous, and a horrible fit of terror came
over him. What if Alan Campbell should be out of England? Days would
elapse before he could come back. Perhaps he might refuse to come. What
could he do then? Every moment was of vital importance. They had been
great friends once, five years before--almost inseparable, indeed. Then
the intimacy had come suddenly to an end. When they met in society now,
it was only Dorian Gray who smiled; Alan Campbell never did.

He was an extremely clever young man, though he had no real appreciation
of the visible arts, and whatever little sense of the beauty of poetry
he possessed he had gained entirely from Dorian. His dominant
intellectual passion was for science. At Cambridge he had spent a great
deal of his time working in the Laboratory, and had taken a good class
in the Natural Science Tripos of his year. Indeed, he was still devoted
to the study of chemistry, and had a laboratory of his own, in which he
used to shut himself up all day long, greatly to the annoyance of his
mother, who had set her heart on his standing for Parliament, and had a
vague idea that a chemist was a person who made up prescriptions. He was
an excellent musician, however, as well, and played both the violin and
the piano better than most amateurs. In fact, it was music that had
first brought him and Dorian Gray together--music and that indefinable
attraction that Dorian seemed to be able to exercise whenever he wished,
and indeed exercised often without being conscious of it. They had met
at Lady Berkshire's the night that Rubinstein played there, and after
that used to be always seen together at the Opera, and wherever good
music was going on. For eighteen months their intimacy lasted. Campbell
was always either at Selby Royal or in Grosvenor Square. To him, as to
many others, Dorian Gray was the type of everything that is wonderful
and fascinating in life. Whether or not a quarrel had taken place
between them no one ever knew. But suddenly people remarked that they
scarcely spoke when they met, and that Campbell seemed always to go away
early from any party at which Dorian Gray was present. He had changed,
to