watching his every movement, as if to follow his thoughts into the innermost labyrinth of the mind. It seemed to Ernest, under the spell of this passing fancy, as though each vase, each picture, each curio in the room, was reflected in Clarke's work. In a long-queued, porcelain Chinese mandarin he distinctly recognised a quaint quatrain in one of Clarke's most marvellous poems. And he could have sworn that the grin of the Hindu monkey-god on the writing-table reappeared in the weird rhythm of two stanzas whose grotesque cadence had haunted him for years.

At last Clarke broke the silence. "You like my studio?" he asked.

[Pg 22]The simple question brought Ernest back to reality.

[Pg 22]

"Like it? Why, it's stunning. It set up in me the queerest train of thought."

"I, too, have been in a whimsical mood to-night. Fancy, unlike genius, is an infectious disease."

"What is the peculiar form it assumed in your case?"

"I have been wondering whether all the things that environ us day by day are, in a measure, fashioning our thought-life. I sometimes think that even my little mandarin and this monkey-idol which, by the way, I brought from India, are exerting a mysterious but none the less real influence upon my work."

"Great God!" Ernest replied, "I have had the identical thought!"

"How very strange!" Clarke exclaimed, with seeming surprise.

"It is said tritely but truly, that great minds travel the same roads," Ernest observed, inwardly pleased.

"No," the older man subtly remarked,[Pg 23] "but they reach the same conclusion by a different route."

[Pg 23]

"And you attach serious importance to our fancy?"

"Why not?"

Clarke was gazing abstractedly at the bust of Balzac.

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