hildren she has left him; who,
humble by nature, yet never knows how proud he is till the bitter thing
happens; all the long pride of the priest who, by dint of exhortation
and remonstrance has coated himself in a superiority he hardly
suspects--all this pride shrivelled in him. Then something writhed and
cried within, as a tortured beast cries, at loss to know why it is being
tortured. How many times has not a man used those words: "My God! My
God! Why hast Thou forsaken me!" He sprang up and tried to pace his
way out of this cage of confusion: His thoughts and feelings made the
strangest medley, spiritual and worldly--Social ostracism--her soul in
peril--a trial sent by God! The future! Imagination failed him. He went
to his little piano, opened it, closed it again; took his hat, and stole
out. He walked fast, without knowing where. It was very cold--a clear,
bitter evening. Silent rapid motion in the frosty air was some relief.
As Noel had fled from him, having 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 wh