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humming bird was drinking at the jet that spouted from the left nipple of Giambologna’s nymph. From the enclosure of the baboons came the shrill noise of battle and copulation. Mr. Stoyte shut his eyes. “God is love,” he repeated, trying deliberately to prolong the delightful condition of euphoria into which those poor kids and Clancy’s good news had plunged him. “God is love. There is no death.” He waited to feel that sense of inward warmth, like the after-effect of whisky, which had followed his previous utterance of the words. Instead, as though some immanent fiend were playing a practical joke on him, he found himself thinking of the shrunken leathery corpses of those nuns, and of his own corpse, and of judgment and the flames. Prudence McGladdery Stoyte had been a Christian Scientist; but Joseph Budge Stoyte, his father, had been a Sandemanian; and Letitia Morgan, his maternal grandmother, had lived and died a Plymouth Sister. Over his cot in the attic room of the little frame house in Nashville, Tennessee, had hung the text, in vivid orange on a black background: “ IT IS A TERRIBLE THING TO FALL INTO THE HANDS OF THE LIVING GOD .” “God is love,” Mr.Stoyte desperately reaffirmed. “There is no death.” But for sinners, such as himself, it was only the worm that never died.
    â€œIf you’re always scared of dying,” Obispo had said, “you’ll surely die. Fear’s a poison; and not such a slow poison either.”
    Making another enormous effort, Mr. Stoyte suddenly began to whistle. The tune was “I’m making hay in the moonlight in my baby’s arms,” but the face which Jeremy Pordage saw and, as though from some horrible and indecent secret, immediately averted his eyes from, was the face of a man in the condemned cell.
    â€œOld sour-puss,” the chauffeur muttered to himself, as he watched his employer get out of the car and walk away.
    Followed by Jeremy, Mr. Stoyte hurried in silence through the Gothic portal, crossed a pillared Romanesque lobby like the Lady Chapel at Durham and, his hat still pulled down over his eyes, stepped into the cathedral twilight of the great hall.
    A hundred feet overhead, the sound of the two men’s footsteps echoed in the vaulting. Like iron ghosts, the suits of armour stood immobile round the walls. Above them, sumptuously dim, the fifteenth-century tapestries opened windows upon a leafy world of phantasy. At one end of the cavernous room, lit by a hidden searchlight, El Greco’s Crucifixion of St. Peter blazed out in the darkness like the beautiful revelation of something incomprehensible and profoundly sinister. At the other, no less brilliantly illuminated, hung a full-length portrait of Hélène Fourment, dressed only in a bearskin cape. Jeremy looked from one to the other—from the ectoplasm of the inverted saint to the unequivocal skin and fat and muscle which Rubens had so loved to see and touch; from unearthly flesh tints of green-white ochre and carmine, shadowed with transparent black, to the creams and warm pinks, the nacreous blues and greens of Flemish nudity. Two shining symbols, incomparably powerful and expressive—but of what, of what? That, of course, was the question.
    Mr. Stoyte paid attention to none of his treasures, but strode across the hall, inwardly cursing his buried wife for having made him think about death by insisting that there wasn’t any.
    The door of the elevator was in an embrasure between pillars. Mr. Stoyte opened it, and the light came on revealing a Dutch lady in blue satin sitting at a harpsichord—sitting, Jeremy reflected, at the very heart of an equation, in a world where beauty and logic, painting and analytical geometry, had become one. With what intention? To express, symbolically, what truths about the nature of things? Again, that was the question. Where art was concerned, Jeremy said to himself, that was always the