led towards the sea, reticent but
more alive, it seemed, than the deeply painful thing which fate had
attached to his brain. He pictured himself tangled in the dark
perplexity of its waters, he fancied them falling upon his face like
a girl's hair, till they darkened his eyes and choked the mouth
which, even now, could not breathe fast enough to satisfy him. The
thought displeased him, and he turned away from the place that held
peace for other men but not for him. From the shadow of one of the
seats a woman's voice reached him, begging peevishly for money.

"I have none," he said automatically. Then he remembered and flung
coins, all the money he had, into her lap. "I give it to you because
I hate you!" he shrieked, and hurried on lest her thanks should spoil
his spite.

Then the black houses and the warped streets had him in their grip
once more, and sported with him till his consciousness waxed to one
white-hot point of pain. Overhead the stars were laughing quietly in
the fields of space, and sometimes a policeman or a chance passer-by
looked curiously at his lurching figure, but he only knew that
life was hurting him beyond endurance, and that he yet endured. Up
and down the ice-cold corridors of his brain, thought, formless and
timeless, passed like a rodent flame. Now he was the universe, a vast
thing loathsome with agony, now he was a speck of dust, an atom whose
infinite torment was imperceptible even to God. Always there was
something--something conscious of the intolerable evil called life,
something that cried bitterly to be uncreated. Always, while his soul
beat against the bars, his body staggered along the streets, a thing
helpless, unguided.

There is an hour before dawn when tired men and women die, and with
the coming of this hour his spirit found a strange release from
pain. Once more he realised that he was a man, and, bruised and
weary as he was, he tried to collect the lost threads of reason,
which the night had torn from him. Facing him he saw a vast building
dimly outlined against the darkness, and in some way it served to
touch a faint memory in his dying brain. For a while he wandered
amongst the shadows, and then he knew that it was the keep of
a castle, his castle, and that high up where a window shone upon the
night a girl was waiting for him, a girl with a face of pearls and
roses. Presently she came to the window and looked out, dressed all
in white for her love's sake. He stood up in