comparative respectability.  Her penetrating snores denoted that she was oblivious of the lounging approach of the policeman, whose blue and burly form was visible in the extreme distance.  Julian stopped to observe her reflectively.  His eye, which loved the grotesque, was pleased by the bedragglement of her attitude, by the flat foot, in its bursting boot, which protruded from the ocean of her mud-stained petticoats, by the wisps of coarse hair wandering in the breeze above her brazen wrinkles.  Poor soul! she kept a diary of her deeds, even though she could perhaps only make a mark where her signature should have been.  Julian stared at her very intently, and as he did so he started violently, for across the human background which her sleeping dissipation supplied there seemed to float the vague shadow, suggestion, call it what you will, of a tongue of flame.

He walked hastily on, angrily blaming his nerves.  As he passed the policeman he fancied he noticed that the man glanced at him with a certain flickering suspicion.  Was horror legibly written in his face? he wondered uneasily, confessing to himself that even in the dawn and the lap of Grosvenor Place a horror had again seized him.  What did this shadow which he had now twice seen portend?  Surely his nerves were not permanently upset.  He was at first heartily ashamed of himself.  Near St. George’s Hospital, gaunt and grey in the morning, he stopped again, bent his left arm forcibly, and with his right hand felt the hard lump of muscle, that sprang up like a ball of iron under his coat sleeve.  And as he felt it he cursed himself for the greatest of all fools.  Thin, meagre little men of the town, tea-party men whose thoughts were ever on their ties and their moustaches, no doubt gave themselves up readily to disturbances of the nerves.  But Julian had always prided himself on being an athlete, able to hold his own in the world by mere muscular force, if need be.  He had found it possible to develop side by side brain and biceps, each to an adequate end.  It had seemed grand to him to hold these scales of his being evenly, to balance them to a hair.  Those scales hung badly now, lopsidedly.  One was up in the clouds.  He resolved that the other should correct it.  After a cold bath and a sleep he would go round to Angelo’s and have an hour’s hard fencing.  Cold water, the Englishman’s panacea for every ill, cold steel, the pioneer’s Minerva, would tonic this errant brain of his and drill it into its customary obedience.  So he said to himself.

And yet as he walked there came to him a notion that this little shadow of a flame was still his companion; that this night just passed, this day just begun, were the birthnight and the birthday of this small, ghostlike thing which had come into being to bear him company, to haunt him.  Yes, as he walked, followed always closely by Rip, and saw the tall iron gates of the Park, Apsley House, the long line of Piccadilly, all uncertain, gentle, reduced to a whimsical mildness