Jane, always a molten mass of useful information, interjects sotto voce into the flood of his narrative that precisely the same ceremony was used for the image of Diana when she was the patron goddess of the Syracusans, and the very same molto buono vino so overcame the populace at one of Diana’s festas that Marcellus, the Roman, after a siege of three years, captured the long and fiercely defended city that very night. The Spider took them later to see the handful of fragments alone remaining of Diana’s fane—broken columns sunk in a fosse between two houses—though once a temple as splendid as Minerva’s. A temple served by many priestesses, and surrounded by a great 151grove sloping down to the fountain of Arethusa. Among these trees the Oceanides herded the sacrificial deer, and troops of just such silken-coated, wavy-horned goats as feed to-day upon the Catanian plain. And to this grove came young girls, offering up, to please the great Huntress, their abandoned childish toys of baked clay. For oddly enough the wild, arrowy goddess who loved to shed the blood of beasts, adored children, and was a special patron of theirs, and would even listen favourably to the petitions of barren wives. There seemed some strange vagueness, some shadowy inexplicableness in the worship of Diana. All the other gods typified some force of nature, some resultant struggle and passion of man caught in nature’s web, but of the moon they knew only that it influenced tides and the growing of plants. What is one to make then of this fierce ivory-skinned Maid who sweeps, crescent-crowned, through the moonlit glades of the deep primitive forests, with bayings of lean questing hounds and echoing call of silver horns, hard on the track of crashing boar, of leaping deer? There is something as glimmeringly elusive, as magically haunting in the personality and the worship of Diana as in the moon itself. They offered the web of this conundrum to the Spider, but he wisely refused to allow himself to be entangled in it. This, however, is anticipating the real course of events. Already, before leaving the Cathedral, another conundrum had been asked and not answered.