creation of the Groves of
Paphos. That sublime Desire which should lead us to the great Unity and
final fulfilment, would seem through all the ages to have driven men
ever further from it. Would a day never dawn when all that uncontrolled
Force should be contained and directed harmoniously, when the pure Isis
of the Egyptian mysteries should cast down the tainted Isis whose
lascivious rites were celebrated in Pompeii? Scarcely perceptible was
the progress of mankind. In every woman was born a spark of Bacchic
fire, which leapt up sweetly at the summons of love or crimson,
shameful, at the beck of lust. There were certain conditions peculiarly
favourable to its evil development; loneliness, according to Kitty
Chester, a loneliness beyond man's understanding....

Paul aroused himself from a reverie and remembered that he had been
thinking of Flamby with a strange and lingering tenderness. The clock on
the mantelpiece recorded the hour of two a.m., and he turned out the
lights in the study and made his way upstairs. He had told Eustace not
to wait up for him, and the house was in darkness. Before Yvonne's room
Paul stopped, and gently opened the door. A faint sound of regular
breathing, and the scent of jasmine came to him. He closed the door as
quietly as he had opened it, and proceeded to the next, which was that
of his own room.

When he retired he threw open the heavy curtains draped before the
windows, and saw that the weather had cleared. White clouds were racing
past the face of the moon. He fell asleep almost immediately, and the
moon pursuing her mystic journey, presently shone fully in upon the
sleeper. Unwittingly Paul was performing one of the rites of the old
Adonis worshippers in sleeping with the moonlight upon his face, and
thus sleeping he was visited by a strange dream....

Drunk with the wine of life, he ran through a grove of scented pines,
flanked by thickets of giant azaleas and taunting one onward and upward
to where faint silver outlines traced upon the azure sky lured to
distant peaks. Etherealised shapes of haunting beauty surrounded him,
and sometimes they seemed to merge into the verdure and sometimes it was
a cloud of blossom that gave up an airy form as a lily gives of its
sweetness, now bearing a white nymph, now an Apollo-limbed youth, sun
kissed and godlike. Gay hued, four footed creatures mingled with the
flying shapes, and all pressed onward; things sleek and eager hastening
through th