table, sat down and wrote two letters. One he put in his pocket, the
other he handed to the valet.

"Take this round to 152, Hertford Street, Francis, and if Mr. Campbell
is out of town, get his address."

As soon as he was alone, he lit a cigarette and began sketching upon a
piece of paper, drawing first flowers and bits of architecture, and then
human faces. Suddenly he remarked that every face that he drew seemed to
have a fantastic likeness to Basil Hallward. He frowned, and getting up,
went over to the book-case and took out a volume at hazard. He was
determined that he would not think about what had happened until it
became absolutely necessary that he should do so.

When he had stretched himself on the sofa, he looked at the title-page
of the book. It was Gautier's Emaux et Camees, Charpentier's
Japanese-paper edition, with the Jacquemart etching. The binding was of
citron-green leather, with a design of gilt trellis-work and dotted
pomegranates. It had been given to him by Adrian Singleton. As he turned
over the pages, his eye fell on the poem about the hand of Lacenaire,
the cold yellow hand "du supplice encore mal lavee," with its downy red
hairs and its "doigts de faune." He glanced at his own white taper
fingers, shuddering slightly in spite of himself, and passed on, till he
came to those lovely stanzas upon Venice:

Sur une gamme chromatique,

Le sein de peries ruisselant,

La Venus de l'Adriatique

Sort de l'eau son corps rose et blanc.

Les domes, sur l'azur des ondes

Suivant la phrase au pur contour,

S'enflent comme des gorges rondes

Que souleve un soupir d'amour.

L'esquif aborde et me depose,

Jetant son amarre au pilier,

Devant une facade rose,

Sur le marbre d'un escalier.

How exquisite they were! As one read them, one seemed to be floating
down the green water-ways of the pink and pearl city, seated in a black
gondola with silver prow and trailing curtains. The mere lines looked to
him like those straight lines of turquoise-blue that follow one as one
pushes out to the Lido. The sudden flashes of colour reminded him of the
gleam of the opal-and-iris-throated birds that flutter round the tall
honeycombed Campanile, or stalk, with such stately grace, through the
dim, dust-stained arcades. Leaning back with half-closed eyes, he kept
saying over and over to himself:

"Devant une facade rose,

Sur le marbre d'un escalier."

The whole of Venice was in those two lines. He remembered the autumn
that he had passed there, and a wonderful love that had stirred him to
mad delightful follies. There was romance in every place. But Venice,
like Oxford, had kept the background for romance, and, to the true
romantic, background was everything, or almost everything. Basil had
been with him part of the time, and had gone wild over Tintoret. Poor
Basil! What a horrible way for a man to die!

He sighed, and took up the volume again, and tried to forget. He read of
the swallows that fly in and out of the little cafe at Smyrna where the
Hadjis sit counting their amber beads and the turbaned merchants smoke
their long tasselled pipes and talk gravely to each other; he read of
the Obelisk in the Place de la Concorde that weeps tears of granite in
its lonely sunless exile and longs to be back by the hot, lotus-covered
Nile, where there are Sphinxes, and rose-red ibises, and white vultures
with gilded claws, and crocodiles with small beryl eyes that crawl over
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


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