And then, a week later, on a still October night, his great yacht lying

where the boat had sunk, with diver and crane and hoisting gear, and

submarine light; and at last, the thing itself brought up from ten

fathoms deep with noise of chain and steam winch, and swung in on deck,

the water-worn baling dropping from it and soon torn off, to show the

precious marble perfect still. And then--'full speed ahead' and west by

north, straight for the Malta channel.

Logotheti's personal reminiscences were not exactly dull, and the vivid

recollection of struggles and danger and visible death made the peace

of his solitude more profound; the priceless thing he had fought for

was alive in the stillness with the supernatural life of the ever

beautiful; his fingers pressed an ebony key in the table beside him and

the marble turned very slowly and steadily and noiselessly on the low

base, seeming to let her shadowy eyes linger on him as she looked back

over the curve of her shoulder. Again his fingers moved, and the motion

ceased, obedient to the hidden mechanism; and so, as he sat still, the

goddess moved this way and that, facing him at his will, or looking

back, or turning quite away, as if ashamed to meet his gaze, being

clothed only in warm light and dreamy shadows, then once more

confronting him in the pride of a beauty too faultless to fear a man's

bold eyes.

He leaned against his cushions, and sipped his coffee now and then, and

let the thin blue smoke make clouds of lace between him and the very

slowly moving marble, for he knew what little things help great

illusions, or destroy them. Nothing was lacking. The dark blue

pavement, combed like rippling water and shot with silver that cast

back broken reflections, was the sea itself; snowy gauze wrapped

loosely round the base was breaking foam; the tinted walls, the morning

sky of Greece; the goddess, Aphrodite, sea-born, too human to be quite

divine, too heavenly to be only a living woman.

And she was his; his not only for the dangers he had faced to have her,

but his because he was a Greek, because his heart beat with a strain of

the ancient sculptor's blood; because his treasure was the goddess of

his far forefathers, who had made her in the image of the loveliness

they adored; because he worshipped her himself, more than half

heathenly; but doubly his now, because his imagination had found her

likeness in the outer world, clothed, breathing and alive, and created

for him only.

He leaned against his cushions, and lines of the old poetry rose to his

lips, and the words came aloud. He loved the sound when he was alone,

the vital rush of it, and the voluptuous pause and the soft, lingering

cadence before it rose again. In the music of each separate verse there

was the whole episode of man's love and woman's, the illusion and the

image, the image and the maddening, leaping, all-satisfying,

softly-subsiding reality.




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