tle in the arena of death.

But the drive, from the doctor's to the city and from there to
Paddington, had seemed unusually full of life's solicitations. The soft,
strained eyes of an over-laden horse, appealing in patience from the
shade of dusty blinkers; the dismal degradation of a music-hall
poster--a funny man with reddened nose and drunken hat, as appealing in
his slavery as the horse; the vaporous blue-green silhouettes of the
Park on a silvery sky;--he had found himself responding to these with
pity, repugnance and pleasure as normally as if they meant for him now
what they always would have meant. That such impressions were so soon to
cease must change all their meaning,--at least, so one would have
supposed; he began to think of that and to wonder a little over the
apparent stoicism of those intervening hours; but, while the mood had
lasted, the fact that he had come to the end of things, that there was a
pit dug across his path, had done hardly more than skim on the outskirts
of his alert yet calm receptivity. He seemed never to have noticed more,
never to have been more conscious of the outer world and so little
conscious of himself.

Now, in the train, the outer world, wraith-like in a sudden summer
shower, became the background as it sped on either side, and thoughts
were in the foreground, thoughts of himself as doomed, and of the life
that he had loved and worked in, as measured into one shallow cupful at
his lips. Even yet it was almost absurd, the difficulty he found in
realising it. The doomed figure detached itself, became that of a
piteous, a curious alien, whom one watched respectfully and from a
distance. From a safe shore he observed the tossing of the rapidly
sinking skiff with its helpless occupant. It required a great pull,
push, and effort of his whole being, like that of awakening from a
half-dream, in order to see, in order to say to himself, really
believing it, that he was the man. Wonder, rather than dread or sorrow,
was still the paramount feeling, though, oppressively, as if he picked
his steps about the verge of an echoing cavern, turning away his eyes,
there lurked behind all that he felt the sense of sudden emptiness and
dark.

It was wonderful, immensely absorbing and interesting, this idea of
being himself doomed. Self-conscious, observant, sensitive as he was, he
still thought more than felt. It was at last credible and indubitable
that he _was_ the man, and he was asking hims