illness, he still felt a yearning, almost painful, towards the movement
and stir of the town. Everything he heard and saw made an intensely
vivid impression. The lions in Trafalgar Square, the great buildings of
Whitehall, filled him with a sort of exultation. He was like a man,
who, after a long sea voyage, first catches sight of land, and stands
straining his eyes, hardly breathing, taking in one by one the lost
features of that face. He walked on to Westminster Bridge, and going to
an embrasure in the very centre, looked back towards the towers.

It was said that the love of those towers passed into the blood. It was
said that he who had sat beneath them could never again be quite the
same. Miltoun knew that it was true--desperately true, of himself. In
person he had sat there but three weeks, but in soul he seemed to have
been sitting there hundreds of years. And now he would sit there no
more! An almost frantic desire to free himself from this coil rose
up within him. To be held a prisoner by that most secret of all his
instincts, the instinct for authority! To be unable to wield authority
because to wield authority was to insult authority. God! It was hard!
He turned his back on the towers; and sought distraction in the faces of
the passers-by.

Each of these, he knew, had his struggle to keep self-respect! Or was it
that they were unconscious of struggle or of self-respect, and just let
things drift? They looked like that, most of them! And all his inherent
contempt for the average or common welled up as he watched them. Yes,
they looked like that! Ironically, the sight of those from whom he had
desired the comfort of compromise, served instead to stimulate that part
of him which refused to let him compromise. They looked soft, soggy,
without pride or will, as though they knew that life was too much for
them, and had shamefully accepted the fact. They so obviously needed to
be told what they might do, and which way they should, go; they would
accept orders as they accepted their work, or pleasures: And the thought
that he was now debarred from the right to give them orders, rankled in
him furiously. They, in their turn, glanced casually at his tall figure
leaning against the parapet, not knowing how their fate was trembling in
the balance. His thin, sallow face, and hungry eyes gave one or two of
them perhaps a feeling of interest or discomfort; but to most he was
assuredly no more than any other man or woman in