CHAPTER II: THE OX-BLOOD VASE

IT WAS A WEEK LATER, and well after two, in the dullest ebb of earth’s deadest hour, when Benson lifted the portière and stepped into my room.

I put down the book at which my brain had been scratching like a dog scratching at a closed door. It was a volume of Gautier’s nouvelles. I had just reached that mildly assuaging point in Une Nuit de Cléopâtre where the mysterious arrow, whistling through the palace window of a queen bored almost to extinction, buries itself quivering in the cedar wainscoting above her couch.

But the incident, this time, seemed to have lost its appeal. The whole thing sounded very empty and old, very foolish and far-away. The thrill of drama, I cogitated, is apt to leak out of a situation when it comes to one over a circuit of two thousand moldering years. So I looke