drumming gently for ever. When he began to take notice again
everything in the house was different. Most of the furniture, paid for
so hardly, was gone. He missed a thing everywhere--chairs, a mirror,
a table: wherever he looked he missed something; and downstairs was
worse--there, everything was gone. His wife had sold all her furniture
to pay for doctors, for medicine, for food and rent. And she was changed
too: good things had gone from her face; she was gaunt, sharp-featured,
miserable--but she was comforted to think he was going back to work
soon.

"There was a flurry in his head when he went to his office. He didn't
know what his employer would say for stopping away. He might blame him
for being sick--he wondered would his employer pay him for the weeks he
was absent. When he stood at the door he was frightened. Suddenly the
thought of his master's eye grew terrible to him: it was a steady, cold,
glassy eye; but he opened the door and went in. His master was there
with another man and he tried to say 'Good morning, sir,' in a natural
and calm voice; but he knew that the strange man had been engaged
instead of himself, and this knowledge posted itself between his tongue
and his thought. He heard himself stammering, he felt that his whole
bearing had become drooping and abject. His master was talking swiftly
and the other man was looking at him in an embarrassed, stealthy, and
pleading manner: his eyes seemed to be apologising for having supplanted
him--so he mumbled 'Good day, sir,' and stumbled out.

"When he got outside he could not think where to go. After a while he
went in the direction of the little park in the centre of the city. It
was quite near and he sat down on an iron bench facing a pond. There
were children walking up and down by the water giving pieces of bread to
the swans. Now and again a labouring man or a messenger went by quickly;
now and again a middleaged, slovenly-dressed man drooped past aimlessly:
sometimes a tattered, self-intent woman with a badgered face flopped by
him. When he looked at these dull people the thought came to him that
they were not walking there at all; they were trailing through hell,
and their desperate eyes saw none but devils around them. He saw himself
joining these battered strollers... and he could not think what he would
tell his wife when he went home. He rehearsed to himself the terms of
his dismissal a hundred times. How his master looked, what he had said:
a