to speculate any more. That's the end of twenty years' work, Robert
Aylward. And to think of it, eighteen months ago, although I seemed so
rich, I was on the verge of bankruptcy--the very verge, not worth five
thousand pounds. Now what did the trick? I wonder what did the trick?"

He walked down the room and stopped opposite the ancient marble, staring
at it--

"Not Venus, I think," he said, with a laugh, "Venus never made any man
rich." He turned and retraced his steps to the other end of the room,
which was veiled in shadow. Here upon a second marble pedestal stood an
object that gleamed dimly through the gloom. It was about ten inches or
a foot high, but in that place nothing more could be seen of it, except
that it was yellow and had the general appearance of a toad. For some
reason it seemed to attract Sir Robert Aylward, for he halted to stare
at it, then stretched out his hand and switched on another lamp, in the
hard brilliance of which the thing upon the pedestal suddenly declared
itself, leaping out of the darkness into light. It was a terrible
object, a monstrosity of indeterminate sex and nature, but surmounted by
a woman's head and face of extraordinary, if devilish loveliness, sunk
back between high but grotesquely small shoulders, like to those of a
lizard, so that it glared upwards. The workmanship of the thing was
rude yet strangely powerful. Whatever there is cruel, whatever there
is devilish, whatever there is inhuman in the dark places of the world,
shone out of the jewelled eyes which were set in that yellow female
face, yellow because its substance was of gold, a face which seemed not
to belong to the embryonic legs beneath, for body there was none, but
to float above them. A hollow, life-sized mask with two tiny frog-like
legs, that was the fashion of it.