He took up his life like a thief.  Was it not stolen?  He could not bear his rooms.  He could not bear the crowded streets.  He could not bear the parks.  He wandered aimlessly from one to the other, driven out of each in turn, consumed by the smouldering flame of his self-contempt.  Scorn seemed written on the faces of the passers-by.  As the day waned, he found himself once again for the twentieth time in the park, pacing in “the dim, persistent rain,” which had been falling all day.

But he could not get away from the distant roar of the traffic.  He heard it everywhere, like the Niagara which he had indeed escaped, but the sound of which would be in his ears till he died.  He drew nearer and nearer to the traffic, and stood still in the rain listening to it intently.  Might one of those thousand wheels be even now bringing his enemy towards him, to force him to keep his unspoken word.  Hugh had not realized that his worst enemy was he who stood with him in the rain.

The forlorn London trees, black and bare, seemed to listen too, and to cling closer to their parks and grass, as if they dimly foresaw the inevitable time coming when they too should toil, and hate, and suffer, as they saw on all sides those stunted uprooted figures toil and suffer, which had once been trees like themselves.  “We shall come to it,” they seemed to say, shivering in all their branches, as they peered through the iron rails at the stream of human life, much as man peers at a passing funeral.

The early night drove Hugh back to the house.  He found a note, from a man who had rooms above him, enclosing a theatre ticket, which at the last moment he had been prevented using.  He instantly clutched at the idea of escaping from himself for a few hours at least.  He hastily changed his wet clothes, ate the food that had been prepared for him, and hurried out once more.

The play was “Julius Caesar,” at Her Majesty’s.  He had seen it several times, but to-night it appealed to him as it had never done before.  He hardly noticed the other actors.  His whole interest centred in the awful figure of Cassius, splendid in its unswerving deathless passion of a great hate and a great love.  His eyes never left the ruthless figure as it stood in silence with its unflinching eyes upon its victim.  Had not Lord Newhaven thus watched him, Hugh, ready to strike when the hour came.

The moment of the murder was approaching.  Hugh held his breath.  Cassius knelt with the rest before Caesar.  Hugh saw his hand seek the handle of his sword, saw the end of the sheath tilt upwards under his robe as the blade slipped out of it.  Then came the sudden outburst of animal ferocity long held in leash, of stab on stab, the self-recovery, the cold stare at the dead figure with Cassius’s foot upon its breast.

For a moment the scene vanished.  Hugh saw again the quiet study with its electric reading-lamp, the pistols over the mantel-piece, the tiger glint in Lord Newhaven’s eyes.  He was like Cassius.  He, too, had been ready to risk life, everything in the prosecution of his hate.