Others crowded round the swinging
doors of the coffee-house in the Piazza. The heavy cart-horses slipped
and stamped upon the rough stones, shaking their bells and trappings.
Some of the drivers were lying asleep on a pile of sacks. Iris-necked,
and pink-footed, the pigeons ran about picking up seeds.

After a little while, he hailed a hansom, and drove home. For a few
moments he loitered upon the doorstep, looking round at the silent
Square with its blank, close-shuttered windows, and its staring blinds.
The sky was pure opal now, and the roofs of the houses glistened like
silver against it. From some chimney opposite a thin wreath of smoke was
rising. It curled, a violet riband, through the nacre-coloured air.

In the huge gilt Venetian lantern, spoil of some Doge's barge, that hung
from the ceiling of the great oak-panelled hall of entrance, lights were
still burning from three flickering jets: thin blue petals of flame they
seemed, rimmed with white fire. He turned them out, and, having thrown
his hat and cape on the table, passed through the library towards the
door of his bedroom, a large octagonal chamber on the ground floor that,
in his new-born feeling for luxury, he had just had decorated for
himself, and hung with some curious Renaissance tapestries that had been
discovered stored in a disused attic at Selby Royal. As he was turning
the handle of the door, his eye fell upon the portrait Basil Hallward
had painted of him. He started back as if in surprise. Then he went on
into his own room, looking somewhat puzzled. After he had taken the
buttonhole out of his coat, he seemed to hesitate. Finally he came back,
went over to the picture, and examined it. In the dim arrested light
that struggled through the cream-coloured silk blinds, the face appeared
to him to be a little changed. The expression looked different. One
would have said that there was a touch of cruelty in the mouth. It was
certainly strange.

He turned round, and, walking to the window, drew up the blind. The
bright dawn flooded the room, and swept the fantastic shadows into dusky
corners, where they lay shuddering. But the strange expression that he
had noticed in the face of the portrait seemed to linger there, to be
more intensified even. The quivering, ardent sunlight showed him the
lines of cruelty round the mouth as clearly as if he had been looking
into a mirror after he had done some dreadful thing.

He winced, and, taking up from the t