“And she?”

“She had fainted.  We had to send for a cab to get her to the station, sir.”

At that moment the presence of the sergeant hurried the policemen away, and Mike was left alone.  The warm night air was full of the fragrance of the leaves, and he was alive to the sensation of the foliage spreading above him, and deepening amid the branches of the tall plane-trees that sequestered and shadowed the fountain.  They grew along the walls, forming a quiet dell, in whose garden silence the dripping fountain sang its song of falling water.  Light and shade fell picturesquely about the steps descending to the gardens, and the parapeted buildings fell in black shadows upon the sward, and stood sharp upon the moon illuminated blue.  Mike sat beneath the plane-trees, and the suasive silence, sweetly tuned by the dripping water, murmured in his soul dismal sorrowings.  Over the cup, whence issued the jet that played during the day, the water flowed.  There were there the large leaves of some aquatic plant, and Mike wondered if, had the policeman not rescued the girl, she would now be in perfect peace, instead of dragged before a magistrate and forced to promise to bear her misery.

“A pretty little tale,” he thought, and he saw her floating in shadowy water in pallor and beauty, and reconciliation with nature.  “Why see another day?  I must die very soon, why not at once?  Thousands have grieved as I am grieving in this self-same place, have asked the same sad questions.  Sitting under these ancient walls young men have dreamed as I am dreaming—­no new thoughts are mine.  For five thousand years man has asked himself why he lives.  Five thousand years have changed the face of the world and the mind of man; no thought has resisted the universal transformation of thought, save that one thought—­why live?  Men change their gods, but one thought floats immortal, unchastened by the teaching of any mortal gods.  Why see another day? why drink again the bitter cup of life when we may drink the waters of oblivion?”

He walked through Pump Court slowly, like a prisoner impeded by the heavy chain, and at every step the death idea clanked in his brain.  All the windows were full of light, and he could hear women’s voices.  In imagination he saw the young men sitting round the sparely furnished rooms, law-books and broken chairs—­smoking and drinking, playing the piano, singing, thinking they were enjoying themselves.  A few years and all would be over for them as all was over now for him.  But never would they drink of life as he had drunk, he was the type of that of which they were but imperfect and inconclusive figments.  Was he not the Don Juan and the poet—­a sort of Byron doubled with Byron’s hero?  But he was without genius; had he genius, genius would force him to live.