There was a pregnant pause. David emptied his tumbler, buttoned up his jacket, and came down the familiar staircase. With no eyes for the evasive beauty of the college chapel, its buttresses and architraves now luteously entwined with wreathes of yellow fog, he crossed the dusk-filled quadrangle towards Mongo’s lighted window, puzzled a little.… * * * * * What days of rich imaginings these were that now came for Gaveston in this Lenten term! How glad and mad and bad it all was! How crowded these weeks where bizarrerie vied with bizarrerie and whimsey with whimsey! First there were books to be bought, were there not? Yes, and bound too in silks and skins marblings fitted to their strangely varying contents. And from the gloomy recesses of Chaundy and the mediæval crypts of Gadney, he brought forth sets of Harland and Crackenthorpe, and all the fascinating chronicles of Sherard and Douglas, Ransome and Crosland, in whose controversial lore he soon became an adept. His shelves bent beneath the crowding volumes of Johnson and Davidson and Dowson and the rarer reprints of the Yellow Book, and soon all the erudition of the Symonses (John Addington and Arthur), was mastered by the young neophyte. And at the last, impatient of so much heavy insularity, he added to his arcana the Oriental canticles of Masoch, the infamous Lesbia’s archipelagian lyrics, the voluptuous and untranslatable masterpieces of Maeterlinck and Le Gallienne. Assiduously too he collected obscure texts from the Silver Age of every tongue, and the declining decades of every century yielded him their rich harvests of perverse and curious fruits. He delighted, for instance, to pore over the Forty-Seven Books of the Eroticks of Kottabos the Syracusan. Recumbent upon a score of Liberty cushions, and meshed in the twining thuriferal fumes of musk and attar and patchouli, Gaveston would ponder upon the corrupt and fetid beauty of the Sicilian’s style, so perfect in its diliquescence that it might almost, he thought, have lain undredged down all these centuries in the green, aqueous silence of some Mediterranean sea-cavern, encrusted by the scum of putrescent molluscs, nibbled by creatures that fantastically goggled, and spawned upon by medusas with transparent tentacular heads. And he remembered how the unique manuscript had been snatched from the flames of fire-doomed Alexandria by the monks of Santa Frustrata in Abyssinia, and lay long concealed in their dove-shaped reliquary of scented cedar-wood, until ’twas ravished from them at the sword’s point by a Borgia, who sought it for the hands of a certain courtesan of Ephesus, and how she, after the fashion of her kind, had bartered it for sables and mummia to a Jew merchant from Novgorod, and how through his trafficking it came to the stockaded palace of the Great Cham of Tartary and thence to the conquering Mpret of Kamschatka. It had later been published in more accessible form by a Mr.