are his knowledge with
some one, to talk it over with her. Neither was possible. Solitude had
never oppressed him more. He grew daily more nervous and hysterical.

For he was all the while tormented by fears and suspicions which stalked
ever by his side, grim and ghostly phantoms. Those wan features and
dark, starving eyes had kindled within him from the first, a hideous
sense of familiarity--against which he fought indeed but ever vainly.
Once before he had seen them, and it was at the moment when his own life
had first come into touch with things tragical. Yet if his memory
served him truthfully, he was surely face to face with an insoluble
enigma. What had Emily de Reuss to do with such a man as this?

As the days passed by leaving the situation unchanged, he made a great
effort to put all these harrowing speculations away, to devote himself
once more to his work, which was beginning to weigh heavily upon him.
In a measure he was successful. He was able to perform such tasks as
fell to his lot during office hours with his usual exactitude, though
everything he wrote was marked at this time with a certain nervous
energy, which, without detracting from its literary value, was a sure
indication of his own mental state. But it was after the day's work was
over that his sufferings commenced in earnest. A vigorous distaste for
the society of his fellows asserted itself. Night after night, his
solitary dinner hastily snatched at an obscure restaurant, he spent
alone in his gaunt sitting-room, his work neglected, his face turned
westwards, his luminous eyes ever fascinated by the prospect which
stretched from the dark street beneath to the murky horizon. Night
after night his imagination peopled with shadows and spectres the great
city, whose lights cast a deep glow upon the brooding clouds, and whose
ceaseless roar of life seemed ever in his ears. Before him lay the
unwritten pages of his novel, through the open window came the sobbing
and wailing, the joy and excitement, the ever ringing chorus of life
which, if only he could interpret it, must make him famous for ever.
Night after night he listened, and drank it in greedily, thrilled
through all his senses by this near contact with the great throbbing
heart of the world. Yet his pen was idle. More than ever he realised
that he had a long apprenticeship to serve. There came a time when he
threw down his manuscript and wandered out into the streets. By such
means alone cou