As he went it seemed to him that the swaying houses buffeted him about as a child might play with a ball.  Sometimes they threw him against men, who cursed him and bruised his soft body with their fists.  Sometimes they tripped him up and hurled him upon the stones of the pavement.  Still he held on, till the Embankment broke before him with the sudden peace of space, and he leant against the parapet, panting and sick with pain, but free from the tyranny of the houses.

Beneath him the river rolled 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 his armour and flashed his sword towards the envying stars.