hip died."

He winced at the mention of his grandfather. He had hateful memories
of him. "That does not matter," he answered. "I simply want to see
the place--that is all. Give me the key."

"And here is the key, sir," said the old lady, going over the contents
of her bunch with tremulously uncertain hands. "Here is the key. I'll
have it off the bunch in a moment. But you don't think of living up
there, sir, and you so comfortable here?"

"No, no," he cried petulantly. "Thank you, Leaf. That will do."

She lingered for a few moments, and was garrulous over some detail of
the household. He sighed and told her to manage things as she thought
best. She left the room, wreathed in smiles.

As the door closed, Dorian put the key in his pocket and looked round
the room. His eye fell on a large, purple satin coverlet heavily
embroidered with gold, a splendid piece of late seventeenth-century
Venetian work that his grandfather had found in a convent near Bologna.
Yes, that would serve to wrap the dreadful thing in. It had perhaps
served often as a pall for the dead. Now it was to hide something that
had a corruption of its own, worse than the corruption of death
itself--something that would breed horrors and yet would never die.
What the worm was to the corpse, his sins would be to the painted image
on the canvas. They would mar its beauty and eat away its grace. They
would defile it and make it shameful. And yet the thing would still
live on. It would be always alive.

He shuddered, and for a moment he regretted that he had not told Basil
the true reason why he had wished to hide the picture away. Basil
would have helped him to resist Lord Henry's influence, and the still
more poisonous influences that came from his own temperament. The love
that he bore him--for it was really love--had nothing in it that was
not noble and intellectual. It was not that mere physical admiration
of beauty that is born of the senses and that dies when the senses
tire. It was such love as Michelangelo had known, and Montaigne, and
Winckelmann, and Shakespeare himself. Yes, Basil could have saved him.
But it was too late now. The past could always be annihilated.
Regret, denial, or forgetfulness could do that. But the future was
inevitable. There were passions in him that would find their terrible
outlet, dreams that would make the shadow of their evil real.

He took up from the couch the great purple-and-gold textur