at the back of the
head in front of him, with his hands clasped round his knee. And soon,
when that little faraway voice was once more speaking, he took his hat,
and glancing neither to right nor left, went out.

Instead of the sensation of relief and wild elation which fills the
heart of those who have taken the first plunge, Miltoun had nothing
in his deep dark well but the waters of bitterness. In truth, with the
delivery of that speech he had but parted with what had been a sort of
anodyne to suffering. He had only put the fine point on his conviction,
of how vain was his career now that he could not share it with Audrey
Noel. He walked slowly towards the Temple, along the riverside, where
the lamps were paling into nothingness before that daily celebration of
Divinity, the meeting of dark and light.

For Miltoun was not one of those who take things lying down; he took
things desperately, deeply, and with revolt. He took them like a rider
riding himself, plunging at the dig of his own spurs, chafing and
wincing at the cruel tugs of his own bitt; bearing in his friendless,
proud heart all the burden of struggles which shallower or more genial
natures shared with others.

He looked hardly less haggard, walking home, than some of those homeless
ones who slept nightly by the river, as though they knew that to lie
near one who could so readily grant oblivion, alone could save them
from seeking that consolation. He was perhaps unhappier than they, whose
spirits, at all events, had long ceased to worry them, having oozed out
from their bodies under the foot of Life:

Now that Audrey Noel was lost to him, her loveliness and that
indescribable quality which made her lovable, floated before him, the
very torture-flowers of a beauty never to be grasped--yet, that he
could grasp, 'if he only would! That was the heart and fervour of
his suffering. To be grasped if he only would! He was suffering, too,
physically from a kind of slow fever, the result of his wetting on the
day when he last saw her. And through that latent fever, things and
feelings, like his sensations in the House before his speech, were all
as it were muffled in a horrible way, as if they all came to him wrapped
in a sort of flannel coating, through which he could not cut. And all
the time there seemed to be within him two men at mortal grips with one
another; the man of faith in divine sanction and authority, on which
all his beliefs had hitherto hinged, a