no stir in the lower rooms. I remembered that because my needs were
so few, my part in life so little, they had begun to come and go as
they would, often leaving me alone for hours. The emptiness and
silence of a world from which I had driven everything but dreams
suddenly overwhelmed me, and I shuddered as I drew the bolt. I found
before me Michael Robartes, whom I had not seen for years, and whose
wild red hair, fierce eyes, sensitive, tremulous lips and rough
clothes, made him look now, just as they used to do fifteen years
before, something between a debauchee, a saint, and a peasant. He had
recently come to Ireland, he said, and wished to see me on a matter
of importance: indeed, the only matter of importance for him and for
me. His voice brought up before me our student years in Paris, and
remembering the magnetic power ne had once possessed over me, a
little fear mingled with much annoyance at this irrelevant intrusion,
as I led the way up the wide staircase, where Swift had passed joking
and railing, and Curran telling stories and quoting Greek, in simpler
days, before men's minds, subtilized and complicated by the romantic
movement in art and literature, began to tremble on the verge of some
unimagined revelation. I felt that my hand shook, and saw that the
light of the candle wavered and quivered more than it need have upon
the Maenads on the old French panels, making them look like the first
beings slowly shaping in the formless and void darkness. When the
door had closed, and the peacock curtain, glimmering like many-
coloured flame, fell between us and the world, I felt, in a way I
could not understand, that some singular and unexpected thing was
about to happen. I went over to the mantlepiece, and finding that a
little chainless bronze censer, set, upon the outside, with pieces of
painted china by Orazio Fontana, which I had filled with antique
amulets, had fallen upon its side and poured out its contents, I
began to gather the amulets into the bowl, partly to collect my