Mr. Heard was expanding in this congenial atmosphere; he felt himself in touch with permanent things.  He glanced at the speaker.  How charming he looked, this silvery-haired old aristocrat!  His ample and gracious personality, his leisurely discourse—­how well they accorded with the environment!  He suggested, in manner, the secret of youth and all that is glad, unclouded, eternal; he was a reflection, a belated flower, of the classic splendour which lay in ruins about him.  Such a man, he thought, deserves to be happy and successful.  What joy it must have been to a person of his temperament—­the chance discovery of the Locri Faun!

A great stillness brooded upon the enclosure beyond.  The shadows had shifted.  Sunny patches lay, distributed in fresh patterns, upon the old brickwork flooring.  An oval shaft of light, glinting through the foliage, had struck the pedestal of the Faun and was stealthily crawling up its polished surface.  He looked at the statue.  It was still slumbering in the shade.  But a subtle change had spread over the figure, or was it, he wondered, merely a change in the state of his own mind, due to what the Count had said?  There was energy, now, in those tense muscles.  The slightest touch, he felt, would unseal the enchantment and cause life to flow through the dull metal.

Mr. van Koppen was slightly ruffled.

“Are you not a little hard on the Puritans?” he asked.  “Where would we have been without them in America?”

“And after all,” added the bishop, “they cleared up an infinity of abuses.  They were temperate, at all events!  Too temperate in some matters, I am inclined to think; they did not always allow for human weakness.  They went straight back to the Bible.”

The Count shook his head slowly.

“The Bible,” he said, “is the most intemperate book I have ever read.”

“Dear me!”

Mr. van Koppen, a tactful person, scented danger ahead.  He remarked: 

“I did not know Italians read the Bible.  Where did you become acquainted with it?”

“In New York.  I often amused myself strolling about the Jewish quarter there and studying the inhabitants.  Wonderful types, wonderful poses!  But hard to decipher, for a person of my race.  One day I said to myself:  I will read their literature; it may be of assistance.  I went through the Talmud and the Bible.  They helped me to understand those people and their point of view.”

“What is their point of view?”

“That God is an overseer.  This, I think, is the keynote of the Bible.  And it explains why the Bible has always been regarded as an exotic among Greco-Latin races, who are all pagans at heart.  Our God is not an overseer; he is a partaker.  For the rest, we find the whole trend of the Bible, its doctrinal tone, antagonistic to those ideals of equanimity and moderation which, however disregarded in practice, have always been held up hereabouts as theoretically desirable.  In short, we Southerners lack what you possess:  an elective affinity with that book.  One may wonder how the morality of those tawny Semites was enabled to graft itself upon your alien white-skinned race with such tenacity as to influence your whole national development.  Well, I think I have at last puzzled it out,” he added, “to my own satisfaction at least.”