he would look out of a window and watch the crowd and color of the
market-place, and now and again a ship came up the river bringing
exquisite silks and the merchandise of unknown lands in the Far East. He
had made a curious and accurate map of the town he proposed to inhabit,
in which every villa was set down and named. He drew his lines to scale
with the gravity of a surveyor, and studied the plan till he was able to
find his way from house to house on the darkest summer night. On the
southern slopes about the town there were vineyards, always under a
glowing sun, and sometimes he ventured to the furthest ridge of the
forest, where the wild people still lingered, that he might catch the
golden gleam of the city far away, as the light quivered and scintillated
on the glittering tiles. And there were gardens outside the city gates
where strange and brilliant flowers grew, filling the hot air with their
odor, and scenting the breeze that blew along the streets. The dull
modern life was far away, and people who saw him at this period wondered
what was amiss; the abstraction of his glance was obvious, even to eyes
not over-sharp. But men and women had lost all their power of annoyance
and vexation; they could no longer even interrupt his thought for a
moment. He could listen to Mr. Dixon with apparent attention, while he
was in reality enraptured by the entreating music of the double flute,
played by a girl in the garden of Avallaunius, for that was the name he
had taken. Mr. Dixon was innocently discoursing archeology, giving a
brief _résumé_ of the view expressed by Mr. Wyndham at the last meeting
of the antiquarian society.

"There can be no doubt that the temple of Diana stood there in pagan
times," he concluded, and Lucian assented to the opinion, and asked a few
questions which seemed pertinent enough. But all the time the flute notes
were sounding in his ears, and the ilex threw a purple shadow on the
white pavement before his villa. A boy came forward from the garden; he