.

Taking no heed of direction, he launched himself into its dark space,
deserted in this cold, homeless wind, that had little sound and no scent,
travelling its remorseless road under the grey-black sky.

The dark firmament and keen cold air suited one who had little need of
aids to emotion--one who had, indeed, but the single wish to get rid, if
he only could, of the terrible sensation in his head, that bruised,
battered, imprisoned feeling of a man who paces his cell--never, never
to get out at either end. Without thought or intention he drove his legs
along; not running, because he knew that he would have to stop the
sooner. Alas! what more comic spectacle for the eyes of a good citizen
than this married man of middle age, striding for hours over those dry,
dark, empty pastures--hunted by passion and by pity, so that he knew not
even whether he had dined! But no good citizen was abroad of an autumn
night in a bitter easterly wind. The trees were the sole witnesses of
this grim exercise--the trees, resigning to the cold blast their crinkled
leaves that fluttered past him, just a little lighter than the darkness.
Here and there his feet rustled in the drifts, waiting their turn to
serve the little bonfires, whose scent still clung in the air. A
desperate walk, in this heart of London--round and round, up and down,
hour after hour, keeping always in the dark; not a star in the sky, not a
human being spoken to or even clearly seen, not a bird or beast; just the
gleam of the lights far away, and the hoarse muttering of the traffic! A
walk as lonely as the voyage of the human soul is lonely from birth to
death with nothing to guide it but the flickering glow from its own frail
spirit lighted it knows not where. . . .

And, so tired that he could hardly move his legs, but free at last of
that awful feeling in his head--free for the first time for days and
days--Lennan came out of the Park at the gate where he had gone in, and
walked towards his home, certain that tonight, one way or the other, it
would be decided. . . .

XV

This then--this long trouble of body and of spirit--was what he
remembered, sitting in the armchair beyond his bedroom fire, watching the
glow, and Sylvia sleeping there exhausted, while the dark plane-tree
leaves tap-tapped at the window in the autumn wind; watching, with the
uncanny certainty that, he would not pass the limits of this night
without having made at last a decision that wou