get better,
and then I go and do what makes me bad again, and that's how it will go
on; and I choose it to be so, and you needn't bring any of your d----d
pity here.'

'I may ask, at least, why aren't you looked after? Why don't you get into
some hospital?' I said.

'Hospital!' cried the sick man, and then he too burst out into that
furious laugh, the most awful sound I ever had heard. Some of the
passers-by stopped to hear what the joke was, and surrounded me with once
more a circle of mockers.

'Hospitals! perhaps you would like a whole Red Cross Society, with
ambulances and all arranged?' cried one. 'Or the _Misericordia_!' shouted
another. I sprang up to my feet, crying, 'Why not?' with an impulse of
rage which gave me strength. Was I never to meet with anything but this
fiendish laughter? 'There's some authority, I suppose,' I cried in my
fury. 'It is not the rabble that is the only master here, I hope.' But
nobody took the least trouble to hear what I had to say for myself. The
last speaker struck me on the mouth, and called me an accursed fool for
talking of what I did not understand; and finally they all swept on and
passed away.

I had been, as I thought, severely injured when I dragged myself into
that corner to save myself from the crowd; but I sprang up now as if
nothing had happened to me. My wounds had disappeared; my bruises were
gone. I was as I had been when I dropped, giddy and amazed, upon the
same pavement, how long--an hour?--before? It might have been an hour,
it might have been a year, I cannot tell. The light was the same as
ever, the thunderous atmosphere unchanged. Day, if it was day, had
made no progress; night, if it was evening, had come no nearer,--all
was the same.

As I went on again presently, with a vexed and angry spirit, regarding on
every side around me the endless surging of the crowd, and feeling a
loneliness, a sense of total abandonment and solitude, which I cannot
describe, there came up to me a man of remarkable appearance. That he was
a person of importance, of great knowledge and information, could not be
doubted. He was very pale, and of a worn but commanding aspect. The lines
of his face were deeply drawn; his eyes were sunk under high arched
brows, from which they looked out as from caves, full of a fiery
impatient light. His thin lips were never quite without a smile; but it
was not a smile in which any pleasure was. He walked slowly, not
hurrying, like most of th