opposite corner. The laurels had grown into black skeletons, patched with
green drift, the ilex gloomed over the porch, the deodar had blighted the
flower-beds. Dark ivies swarmed over an elm-tree, and a brown clustering
fungus sprang in gross masses on the lawn, showing where the roots of
dead trees moldered. The blue verandah, the blue balcony over the door,
had faded to grey, and the stucco was blotched with ugly marks of
weather, and a dank smell of decay, that vapor of black rotten earth in
old town gardens, hung heavy about the gates. And then a row of musty
villas had pushed out in shops to the pavement, and the things in faded
black buzzed and stirred about the limp cabbages, and the red lumps of
meat.

It was the same terrible street, whose pavements he had trodden so often,
where sunshine seemed but a gaudy light, where the fume of burning bricks
always drifted. On black winter nights he had seen the sparse lights
glimmering through the rain and drawing close together, as the dreary
road vanished in long perspective. Perhaps this was its most appropriate
moment, when nothing of its smug villas and skeleton shops remained but
the bright patches of their windows, when the old house amongst its
moldering shrubs was but a dark cloud, and the streets to the north and
south seemed like starry wastes, beyond them the blackness of infinity.
Always in the daylight it had been to him abhorred and abominable, and
its grey houses and purlieus had been fungus-like sproutings, an
efflorescence of horrible decay.

But on that bright morning neither the dreadful street nor those who
moved about it appalled him. He returned joyously to his den, and
reverently laid out the paper on his desk. The world about him was but a
grey shadow hovering on a shining wall; its noises were faint as the
rustling of trees in a distant wood. The lovely and exquisite forms of
those who served the Amber Venus were his distinct, clear, and manifest
visions, and for one amongst them who came to him in a fire of bronze
hair his heart stirred with the adoration of love. She it was who stood
forth from all the rest and fell down prostrate before the radiant form
in amber, drawing out her pins in curious gold, her glowing brooches of
enamel, and pouring from a silver box all her treasures of jewels and
precious stones, chrysoberyl and sardonyx, opal and diamond, topaz and
pearl. And then she stripped from her body her precious robes and stood
before t