“Of late my appetite has gone, and even wine has lost its flavour. I am becoming, I fancy, rather quickly either a dyspeptic or an aged man.” “Dreadful things those, Alphonso! You must cure them! ‘Youth to the end!’ One of the mottoes of the Gods! Badly carried out by mortals, but still--ah! of course I forgot you are mortal yourself. So am I--so am I; for the moment I forgot!” The High Priest neither smiled nor commented; the pallor of extreme weariness was on his features--the weariness of work and years. So once more St Armand continued. “I came back by Greensward Avenue to-night. There’s a building there rather took my fancy, though it was too dark to see it properly except with a pair of highly-polished glasses I possess. Black marble--red blinds--aggressively red, seeing I consider that colour my monopoly--the western windows brightly lit--the eastern ones dark.” Alphonso looked up at him across the polished silver vessels and costly china, and the expression on his face was more attentive. “Marble house lit up in the western wing! It has been empty for years!” “Indeed! how many would you say?” “Nine, at the least. Let me see. Barringcourt went back to Fairy Sky just after my installation. Eloped with a girl who--why do you smile?” “Nothing! Nothing, I assure you. The frivolity of an elopement, I suppose, in these days when women may be had so cheaply!” “Be that as it may, he was the most fascinating companion I ever knew. I think if I ever came near to loving any one it was he. And yet we quarrelled, over a girl too.” “That is not uncommon.” “Indeed, it was more uncommon than you’d think. She had committed sacrilege, and should have suffered imprisonment for life. Had I had my way, she should have been in prison yet. But he, for no reason, suddenly developed an interest in her, behaved like a fool on more than one occasion, and ended up by running off with her in the teeth of the law.” “Exactly as his parents did. It runs in the spirit--damn it! I mean the blood.” “You knew him?” asked the High Priest with surprised interest. “Only by hearsay--purely by that. He was wealthy. That’s enough, you know--Lucifram’s a small place.” “Yes, he was wealthy. But his wealth was the least thing about him,” and suddenly the High Priest stretched his arms out on the table. “I don’t know how it was, but, when he went, all my youth, all my real life, went. And others have remarked the same thing in themselves. With him there came a brilliancy. I felt when he was gone how much of it had all been borrowed. This perhaps sounds strange to you, a stranger to these parts. But he was young, easy, free, generous to a fault, or so it seemed till near the end. And now, when I look back, I wonder if it is not the dream of years since. For it seems often there was something dark in that visage--something hard behind the merry laugh--something sinister under the fascinating smile--some fierce temper behind the contrary outbursts of youth.”