ecious marble perfect still. And then--'full speed ahead' and west by
north, straight for the Malta channel.

Logotheti's personal reminiscences were not exactly dull, and the vivid
recollection of struggles and danger and visible death made the peace
of his solitude more profound; the priceless thing he had fought for
was alive in the stillness with the supernatural life of the ever
beautiful; his fingers pressed an ebony key in the table beside him and
the marble turned very slowly and steadily and noiselessly on the low
base, seeming to let her shadowy eyes linger on him as she looked back
over the curve of her shoulder. Again his fingers moved, and the motion
ceased, obedient to the hidden mechanism; and so, as he sat still, the
goddess moved this way and that, facing him at his will, or looking
back, or turning quite away, as if ashamed to meet his gaze, being
clothed only in warm light and dreamy shadows, then once more
confronting him in the pride of a beauty too faultless to fear a man's
bold eyes.

He leaned against his cushions, and sipped his coffee now and then, and
let the thin blue smoke make clouds of lace between him and the very
slowly moving marble, for he knew what little things help great
illusions, or destroy them. Nothing was lacking. The dark blue
pavement, combed like rippling water and shot with silver that cast
back broken reflections, was the sea itself; snowy gauze wrapped
loosely round the base was breaking foam; the tinted walls, the morning
sky of Greece; the goddess, Aphrodite, sea-born, too human to be quite
divine, too heavenly to be only a living woman.

And she was his; his not only for the dangers he had faced to have her,
but his because he was a Greek, because his heart beat with a strain of
the ancient sculptor's blood; because his treasure was the goddess of
his far forefathers, who had made her in the image of the loveliness
they adored; because he worshipped her himself, more than half
heathenly; but doubly his now, because his imagination had found her
likeness in the outer world, clothed, breathing and alive, and created
for him only.

He leaned against his cushions, and lines of the old poetry rose to his
lips, and the words came aloud. He loved the sound when he was alone,
the vital rush of it, and the voluptuous pause and the soft, lingering
cadence before it rose again. In the music of each separate verse there
was the whole episode of man's love and woman's, the illu