queer icy pleasure in flinging them out into the silence.
Round him there seemed no longer men, only mouths and eyes. And he had
enjoyment in the feeling that with these words of his he was holding
those hungry mouths and eyes dumb and unmoving. Then he knew that he had
reached the end of what he had to say, and sat down, remaining motionless
in the centre of a various sound; staring at the back of the head in
front of him, with his hands clasped round his knee. And soon, when that
little faraway voice was once more speaking, he took his hat, and
glancing neither to right nor left, went out.

Instead of the sensation of relief and wild elation which fills the heart
of those who have taken the first plunge, Miltoun had nothing in his deep
dark well but the waters of bitterness. In truth, with the delivery of
that speech he had but parted with what had been a sort of anodyne to
suffering. He had only put the fine point on his conviction, of how vain
was his career now that he could not share it with Audrey Noel. He
walked slowly towards the Temple, along the riverside, where the lamps
were paling into nothingness before that daily celebration of Divinity,
the meeting of dark and light.

For Miltoun was not one of those who take things lying down; he took
things desperately, deeply, and with revolt. He took them like a rider
riding himself, plunging at the dig of his own spurs, chafing and wincing
at the cruel tugs of his own bitt; bearing in his friendless, proud heart
all the burden of struggles which shallower or more genial natures shared
with others.

He looked hardly less haggard, walking home, than some of those homeless
ones who slept nightly by the river, as though they knew that to lie near
one who could so readily grant oblivion, alone could save them from
seeking that consolation. He was perhaps unhappier than they, whose
spirits, at all events, had long ceased to worry them, having oozed out
from their bodies under the foot of Life:

Now that Audrey Noel was lost to him, her loveliness and that
indescribable quality which made her lovable, floated before him, the
very torture-flowers of a beauty never to be grasped--yet, that he could
grasp, 'if he only would! That was the heart and fervour of his
suffering. To be grasped if he only would! He was suffering, too,
physically from a kind of slow fever, the result of his wetting on the
day when he last saw her. And through that latent fever, things