the city. His lodging was above the workroom and shop of a
recoverer of ancient coins and intaglios, skilful cleanser and mender
of these and merchant to whom would buy. The man was artist besides,
maker of strange drawings whom few ever understood or bought.

Glenfernie liked him--an elderly, fine, thin, hook-nosed, dark-eyed,
subtle-lipped, little-speaking personage. No great custom came to the
shop in front; the owner of it might work all day in the room behind,
with only two or three peals of a small silvery summoning bell. The
lodger acquired the habit of sitting for perhaps an hour out of each
twenty-four in this workroom. He might study at the window gem or coin
and the finish of old designs, or he might lift and look at sheet
after sheet of the man's drawings, or watch him at his work, or have
with him some talk.

The drawings had a fascination for him. "What did you mean behind this
outward meaning? Now here I see this, and I see that, but here I don't
penetrate." The man laid down his mending a broken Eros and came and
stood by the table and spoke. Glenfernie listened, the wood propping
elbow, the hand propping chin, the eyes upon the drawing. Or he leaned
back in the great visitor's chair and looked instead at the draftsman.
They were strange drawings, and the draftsman's models were not
materially visible.

To-day Glenfernie came from the noise of Rome without into this room.
His host was sitting before a drawing-board. Alexander stood and
looked.

"Are you trying to bring the world of the plane up a dimension? Then
you work from an idea above the world of the solid?"

"_Si._ Up a dimension."

"What are these forms?"

"I am dreaming the new eye, the new ear, the new hand."

Glenfernie watched the moving and the resting hand. Later in the day
he returned to the room.

"It has been a fertile season," said the artist. "Look!"

At the top of a sheet of paper was written large in Latin, LOVE IS
BLIND. Beneath stood a figure filled with eyes. "It is the same
thing," said the man.

The next day, at sunset, going up to his room after restless wandering
in this city, he found there from Ian another intimation of the
latter's movements:

GLENFERNIE,--I am going northward. There will be a
month spent at monseigneur's villa upon the Lake of Como.
Then France again.--IAN RULLOCK.

Alexander laid the paper upon the table before him, and now he stared
at it, and now he gazed at space beyon