se, now, that you will
always be faithful in the future. You shall give me the names of your
old friends and I shall see if all this great mistake cannot be
forgotten."

XIII

Turning up the lights in his study, Paul seated himself in the great
carved chair before his writing-table, and looked for a long time at a
set of corrected proofs which lay there. Then, leaning back in the chair
he stared about the room at the new and strange ornaments which he had
collected in accordance with his system of working amid sympathetic
colour. His meeting with Kitty Chester he accepted as a message of
encouragement designed to restore his faith in himself and his mission.
That he had accomplished her redemption he did not dare to believe, but
at least he had rendered it possible. He readily recognised the
symbolical significance of their meeting, and it tinged his reflections
and quickened his genius, so that a new light was shed thereby upon
some of the darker places of the religious past.

Close to his hand, upon an ebony pedestal, stood a squat stone figure
having the head of a man with the face of a bull. It was an idol of
incalculable age, from Jules Thessaly's collection, a relic of
prehistoric Greece and the ancient worship of the threefold Hecate. Set
in some remote Thracian valley, it had once looked down upon orgies such
as few modern minds can imagine, had seen naked Bacchantes surrounded by
tamed jungle beasts and having their arms enwreathed with living
serpents, flinging themselves prostrate before its altar, and then amid
delirious dances calling upon the Bull-faced Bacchus of whom we read in
one of the Orphic hymns....

Dimly visible in a recess of the black-oak bureau was Kali, goddess of
Desire, and near her, in a narrow cupboard, the light impinged upon a
white, smooth piece of stone which was attached to a wooden frame. It
was the emblem of Venus Urania from the oldest temple in Cyprus. These
priceless relics were all lent by Thessaly, as were an imperfect
statuette in wood, fossilised with age and probably of Moabite origin,
representing Ashtaroth, daughter of Sin, and a wonderfully preserved
ivory figure, half woman and half fish, of Derceto of Ascalon. The
sacred courtesans of the past and the Kitty Chesters of the present
(mused Paul) all were expressions of that mystic principle, IEVE, upon
which the universe turns as a compass upon its needle, and which,
reproduced in our gross bodies, has led to the