in a circle of
shadowy villas, awful as the buried streets of Herculaneum, now in lanes
dipping onto open country, that led him past great elm-trees whose white
boughs were all still, and past the bitter lonely fields where the mist
seemed to fade away into grey darkness. As he wandered along these
unfamiliar and ghastly paths he became the more convinced of his utter
remoteness from all humanity, he allowed that grotesque suggestion of
there being something visibly amiss in his outward appearance to grow
upon him, and often he looked with a horrible expectation into the faces
of those who passed by, afraid lest his own senses gave him false
intelligence, and that he had really assumed some frightful and revolting
shape. It was curious that, partly by his own fault, and largely, no
doubt, through the operation of mere coincidence, he was once or twice
strongly confirmed in this fantastic delusion. He came one day into
a lonely and unfrequented byway, a country lane falling into ruin, but
still fringed with elms that had formed an avenue leading to the old
manor-house. It was now the road of communication between two far
outlying suburbs, and on these winter nights lay as black, dreary, and
desolate as a mountain track. Soon after the frost began, a gentleman had
been set upon in this lane as he picked his way between the corner where
the bus had set him down, and his home where the fire was blazing, and
his wife watched the clock. He was stumbling uncertainly through the
gloom, growing a little nervous because the walk seemed so long, and
peering anxiously for the lamp at the end of his street, when the two
footpads rushed at him out of the fog. One caught him from behind, the
other struck him with a heavy bludgeon, and as he lay senseless they
robbed him of his watch and money, and vanished across the fields. The
next morning all the suburb rang with the story; the unfortunate merchant
had been grievously hurt, and wives watched their husbands go out in the
morning with sickening apprehension, not knowing what might happen at
night. Lucian of course was ignorant of all these rumors, and struck into
the gloomy by-road without caring where he was or whither the way would
lead him.

He had been driven out that day as with whips, another hopeless attempt
to return to the work had agonised him, and existence seemed an
intolerable pain. As he entered the deeper gloom, where the fog hung
heavily, he began, half consciously,