After a second’s hesitation George went in. The room was long and low, with French windows opening on to a verandah, from which the lawn ran down to the river. The walls were painted in eighteenth century fashion but in the nineteenth century spirit. Grey pools fringed with delicate bulrushes, astride on whose bent heads sat gauze-winged elves; a smooth summer sea with the phantom ship of Vanderdecken crossing the sun’s path like a shred of mist; a siren asleep under the sea with a feathery pink sea-anemone for pillow, the sunlight shining down through the green water so that you looked and saw the baleful maid and looked again and lost her. All these pale fairy pictures, which emerged at intervals out of a fleecy background of cloud and tree, gave place as the eye travelled round the walls to deeper-hued representations of less ethereal romance. A golden-haired Guinevere, with blue unholy eyes and loose mouth red with kisses, looks lingeringly out of her window in the dawn to where among the grey trees of the distance the gleam of a helmet makes a faint spark of silver light. A furnace-eyed, cynical Vivien, with passionate triumph fanning the glow of her swarthy evil beauty, glides up in the gathering darkness among overhanging cypresses from where, an undistinguishable heap, lies the insensible body of the conquered Merlin. A tiny brown-skinned, lithe-limbed Cleopatra, clad in chains of coins and little else, crouches submissive and seductive before Cæsar, raising long black eyes, twinkling with a thousand meanings, to the conqueror’s face, while the black soldier-slave stands in the background, still holding the mattress in which he has brought his queen hidden, and casting furtive, fearful looks at the world-famous pair. George shuddered: Cleopatra was like Nouna. He cast only a hasty glance at the other pictures, noting the last, a scene drawn from the most moving of modern romances, where Manon Lescaut, bewitching in her little frills and flounces of butterfly Parisian finery, descends upon young Des Grieux in his sombre Abbé’s gown, and wins him, with smiles and tears and caresses, to her for ever.