nd a desperate warm-blooded hungry
creature. He was very miserable, craving strangely for the society of
someone who could understand what he was feeling, and, from long habit
of making no confidants, not knowing how to satisfy that craving.

It was dawn when he reached his rooms; and, sure that he would not
sleep, he did not even go to bed, but changed his clothes, made himself
some coffee, and sat down at the window which overlooked the flowered
courtyard.

In Middle Temple Hall a Ball was still in progress, though the glamour
from its Chinese lanterns was already darkened and gone. Miltoun saw
a man and a girl, sheltered by an old fountain, sitting out their last
dance. Her head had sunk on her partner's shoulder; their lips were
joined. And there floated up to the window the scent of heliotrope,
with the tune of the waltz that those two should have been dancing. This
couple so stealthily enlaced, the gleam of their furtively turned eyes,
the whispering of their lips, that stony niche below the twittering
sparrows, so cunningly sought out--it was the world he had abjured! When
he looked again, they--like a vision seen--had stolen away and gone;
the music too had ceased, there was no scent of heliotrope. In the stony
niche crouched a stray cat watching the twittering sparrows.

Miltoun went out, and, turning into the empty Strand, walked on--without
heeding where, till towards five o'clock he found himself on Putney
Bridge.

He rested there, leaning over the parapet, looking down at the grey
water. The sun was just breaking through the heat haze; early waggons
were passing, and already men were coming in to work. To what end did
the river wander up and down; and a human river flow across it twice
every day? To what end were men and women suffering? Of the full
current of this life Miltoun could no more see the aim, than that of the
wheeling gulls in the early sunlight.

Leaving the bridge he made towards Barnes Common. The night was
still ensnared there on the gorse bushes grey with cobwebs and starry
dewdrops. He passed a tramp family still sleeping, huddled all together.
Even the homeless lay in each other's arms!

From the Common he emerged on the road near the gates of Ravensham;
turning in there, he found his way to the kitchen garden, and sat down
on a bench close to the raspberry bushes. They were protected from
thieves, but at Miltoun's approach two blackbirds flustered out through
the netting and flew