Page:The King in Yellow (1895).djvu/70

58 The marble was white as snow, but in its depths the veins of the lily were tinged with palest azure, and a faint flush lingered deep in its heart.

“Don’t ask me the reason of that,” he smiled, noticing my wonder. “I have no idea why the veins and heart are tinted, but they always are. Yesterday I tried one of Geneviève’s gold fish,—there it is.”

The fish looked as if sculptured in marble. But if you held it to the light the stone was beautifully veined with a faint blue, and from somewhere within came a rosy light like the tint which slumbers in an opal. I looked into the basin. Once more it seemed filled with clearest crystal.

“If I should touch it now?” I demanded.

“I don’t know,” he replied, “but you had better not try.”

“There is one thing I’m curious about,” I said, “and that is where the ray of sunlight came from.”

“It looked like a sunbeam true enough,” he said. “I don’t know, it always comes when I immerse any living thing. Perhaps,” he continued smiling, “perhaps it is the vital spark of the creature escaping to the source from whence it came.”

I saw he was mocking and threatened him with a mahl-stick, but he only laughed and changed the subject.

“Stay to lunch. Geneviève will be here directly.”

“I saw her going to early mass,” I said, “and she looked as fresh and sweet as that lily—before you destroyed it.”

“Do you think I destroyed it?” said Boris gravely.