’Thou questionest of this vision, Theosutos? I answer, How many changes can be rung on a carillon of eight bells? By such measure shalt thou imagine, an thou canst, the changes possible to the myriad of particles that go to the composition of a single human eye. Now, in the unthinkable dispersements and readjustments of Infinity, shall it not sometimes happen that two particles, or two thousand particles, or two billion particles, out of the sum of particles which were that eye, shall chance together again, and recover, because of that meeting, some very ancient, very remote impression which they once absorbed in common? These, Theosutos, be the ghosts, haphazard, indefinable, visible to one and unseen of all the rest, which make the solitary seer; these be the lonely hauntings of the ages—dust blown over desolate places, to commingle a moment at some cross roads, and weave a phantom wreath of memory, and so again be cast and scattered among the cycles. Thy vision is but a shadow of old dead years.’ An ill-repressed stutter of laughter from the prisoner at the foot of the steps greeted the finish of this exegesis. Lascaris flushed scarcely perceptibly. The Duke took no more notice of man or sound than he would have of a whimpering dog. Once or twice he stammered an oath, gnawing his finger, and frowning up, and down, and up again at the Greek. Finally he broke out, in a fury:— ’Now, by the Host, thou consolest me—now, by the Host! To reconcile to this spectre by arguing it perpetual! To——’ Grinding his teeth, he clipped his long fingers on the bench arm, as if he were about to spring. Lascaris forestalled him with a placid word:— ’Not perpetual. The mood invokes these shadows, as the mood shall lay them.’ Galeazzo snarled. ’The mood! What mood, fool? You shift and shift. God! it will be the mood of the mood next. Hast thou no master-key to all? Go to, then!’ He sank back into his cushions, glooming and panting. The sleek olive mask of the face near him yielded no sign of perturbation. Gradually a very deadly expression came to usurp in the Duke’s eyes that blinder madness of desperation. An indolent smile relaxed his features. He yawned, it was because, the soul horror being temporarily withdrawn, the incontinent devil was supplanting in him the tempestuous one. He rolled lazily about, addressing his creature once more:— ’You doctors—all the same! Big words to little cures. Treat a State’s constitution or a man’s—’tis the word’s the thing. Ye woo not the truth, but her raiment. Hear’st me? I had a tutor once, a crabbed fellow called Montano.’ He yawned again. The prisoner below (Cola Montano himself) gasped slightly, and shot one stealthy glance his way. Lascaris sniggered. ’Surely, lord,’ he said, ’we need no reminding while the man himself keeps his tongue.’ A half-suppressed snarl broke from the prisoner. Galeazzo, hunched on his cushions, stared vacantly before him.