His steps echoed hollow on the old pavement.  Full of shadow the roofs of the square church swept across the sky; the triple lancet windows caught a little light from the gaslight on the buildings; and he wondered what was the meaning of the little gold lamb standing over one doorway, and then remembered that in various forms the same symbolic lamb is repeated through the Temple.  He passed under the dining-hall by the tunnel, and roamed through the spaces beneath the plane-trees of King’s Bench Walk.  “My friends think my life was a perfect gift, but a burning cinder was placed in my breast, and time has blown it into flame.”

In the soporific scent of the lilies and the stocks, the night drowsed in the darkness of the garden; Mike unlocked the gate and passed into the shadows, and hypnotized by the heavenly spaces, in which there were a few stars; by the earth and the many emanations of the earth; by the darkness which covered all things, hiding the little miseries of human existence, he threw himself upon the sward crying, “Oh, take me, mother, hide me in thy infinite bosom, give me forgetfulness of the day.  Take and hide me away.  We leave behind a corpse that men will touch.  Sooner would I give myself to the filthy beaks of vultures, than to their more defiling sympathies.  Why were we born?  Why are we taught to love our parents?  It is they whom we should hate, for it was they who, careless of our sufferings, inflicted upon us the evil of life.  We are taught to love them because the world is mad; there is nothing but madness in the world.  Night, do not leave me; I cannot bear with the day.  Ah, the day will come; nothing can retard the coming of the day, and I can bear no longer with the day.”

Hearing footsteps, he sprang to his feet, and walking in the direction whence the sound came, he found himself face to face with the policeman.

“Not able to get to sleep sir?”

“No, I couldn’t sleep, the night is so hot; I shall sleep presently though.”

They had not walked far before the officer, pointing to one of the gables of the Temple gardens, said—­

“That’s where Mr. Williamson threw himself over, sir; he got out on the roof, on to the highest point he could reach.”

“He wanted,” said Mike, “to do the job effectually.”

“He did so; he made a hole two feet deep.”

“They put him into a deeper one.”

The officer laughed; and they walked round the gardens, passing by the Embankment to King’s Bench Walk.  Opening the gate there, the policeman asked Mike if he were coming out, but he said he would return across the gardens, and let himself out by the opposite gate.  He walked, thinking of what he and the policeman had been saying—­the proposed reduction in the rents of the chambers, the late innovation of throwing open the gardens to the poor children of the neighbourhood, and it was not until he stooped to unlock the gate that he remembered that he was alive.