uttered her news, so did he fly from her. The
afflicted walk fast. He was soon down by the river, and turned West
along its wall. The moon was up, bright and nearly full, and the
steel-like shimmer of its light burnished the ebbing water. A cruel
night! He came to the Obelisk, and leaned against it, overcome by a
spasm of realisation. He seemed to see his dead wife's face staring at
him out of the past, like an accusation. "How have you cared for Nollie,
that she should have come to this?" It became the face of the moonlit
sphinx, staring straight at him, the broad dark face with wide nostrils,
cruel lips, full eyes blank of pupils, all livened and whitened by the
moonlight--an embodiment of the marvellous unseeing energy of Life,
twisting and turning hearts without mercy. He gazed into those eyes with
a sort of scared defiance. The great clawed paws of the beast, the
strength and remorseless serenity of that crouching creature with human
head, made living by his imagination and the moonlight, seemed to him
like a temptation to deny God, like a refutation of human virtue.

Then, the sense of beauty stirred in him; he moved where he could see its
flanks coated in silver by the moonlight, the ribs and the great muscles,
and the tail with tip coiled over the haunch, like the head of a serpent.
It was weirdly living; fine and cruel, that great man-made thing. It
expressed something in the soul of man, pitiless and remote from love--or
rather, the remorselessness which man had seen, lurking within man's
fate. Pierson recoiled from it, and resumed his march along the
Embankment, almost deserted in the bitter cold. He came to where, in the
opening of the Underground railway, he could see the little forms of
people moving, little orange and red lights glowing. The sight arrested
him by its warmth and motion. Was it not all a dream? That woman and
her daughter, had they really come? Had not Noel been but an apparition,
her words a trick which his nerves had played him? Then, too vividly
again, he saw her face against the dark stuff of the curtain, the curve
of her hand plucking at her blouse, heard the sound of his own horrified:
"Nollie!" No illusion, no deception! The edifice of his life was in the
dust. And a queer and ghastly company of faces came about him; faces he
had thought friendly, of good men and women whom he knew, yet at that
moment did not know, all gathered round Noel, with fingers pointing at
h