An artificial environment must be necessary to such an artificial condition of feeling.  For Julian now gradually began to believe that Dr. Levillier was right, and that he had somehow allowed himself to become unnaturally affected and strung up.  He could believe this in the air and in the dawn.  For he escaped out of prison as he walked, and heard the dirty sparrows begin to twitter as they sank to the brown puddles in the roadway, or soared to the soot that clung round the chimneys which they loved.

And yet he had been communing with death, had for the first time completely realized the fact and the meaning of death.  What a demon of the world it was, sly, bitter, chuckling at its power, the one thing, surely, that has perfect enjoyment of all the things in the scheme of the earth.  What a trick it had played on Julian and on Valentine.  What a trick!  And as this idea struck into Julian’s mind he found himself on the pavement by the chemist’s shop that is opposite to the underground railway station of Victoria.  His eyes fell on the hutch of the boy-messengers, and he beheld through the glass shutter three heads.  He crossed the road and tapped on the glass.  A young man pulled it up.

“Want to send a message, sir?”

“No.  I wish to speak to one of your boys, if the one I mean is here.  Ah, there he is.”

Julian pointed to his little Hermes of the midnight, who was crouched within, uneasily sleeping, his chin nestling wearily among the medals which his exemplary conduct had won for him.  The young man shook the child by the shoulder.

“Hulloh, Bob!” he yelled.  “Here’s a gentleman wants to speak to yer.”

Bob came from his dreams with a jerk, and stared upon Julian with his big brown eyes.  Presently he began to realize matters.

“Want another doctor, sir?  It ain’t no manner of good,” he remarked airily, beginning to search for his cap, and to glow in the prospect of another cab-ride.

“No,” said Julian.  “I stopped to tell you that you were wrong.  The gentleman is quite well again.”

He put his hand into his pocket and produced half a crown.

“There’s something for your mistake,” he said.

Bob took it solemnly, and, as Julian walked on, called after him: 

“It wasn’t my fault, sir; it was father’s.”

He had more desire to shine as an intellectual authority on great matters of dissolution than to respect the departed.  Julian could not help smiling at the child’s evident discomfiture as he pursued his way towards Grosvenor Place.  On one of the doorsteps of the big houses that drive respect like a sharp nail into the hearts of the poor passers-by, a ragged old woman was tumultuously squatting.  Her gin-soddened face came, like a scarlet cloud, to the view from the embrace of a vagabond black bonnet, braided with rags, viciously glittering here and there with the stray bugles which survived from some bygone era of