the glass, the flash, the wreath of smoke, the faint, exciting smell of gunpowder, and the spot of blood upon that alabaster shoulder.  It had been murder attempted at least.  No occupation could distract his thoughts from that.  The horror of it seemed ever chilling his veins.  He longed to share his knowledge with some one, to talk it over with her.  Neither was possible.  Solitude had never oppressed him more.  He grew daily more nervous and hysterical.

For he was all the while tormented by fears and suspicions which stalked ever by his side, grim and ghostly phantoms.  Those wan features and dark, starving eyes had kindled within him from the first, a hideous sense of familiarity—­against which he fought indeed but ever vainly.  Once before he had seen them, and it was at the moment when his own life had first come into touch with things tragical.  Yet if his memory served him truthfully, he was surely face to face with an insoluble enigma.  What had Emily de Reuss to do with such a man as this?

As the days passed by leaving the situation unchanged, he made a great effort to put all these harrowing speculations away, to devote himself once more to his work, which was beginning to weigh heavily upon him.  In a measure he was successful.  He was able to perform such tasks as fell to his lot during office hours with his usual exactitude, though everything he wrote was marked at this time with a certain nervous energy, which, without detracting from its literary value, was a sure indication of his own mental state.  But it was after the day’s work was over that his sufferings commenced in earnest.  A vigorous distaste for the society of his fellows asserted itself.  Night after night, his solitary dinner hastily snatched at an obscure restaurant, he spent alone in his gaunt sitting-room, his work neglected, his face turned westwards, his luminous eyes ever fascinated by the prospect which stretched from the dark street beneath to the murky horizon.  Night after night his imagination peopled with shadows and spectres the great city, whose lights cast a deep glow upon the brooding clouds, and whose ceaseless roar of life seemed ever in his ears.  Before him lay the unwritten pages of his novel, through the open window came the sobbing and wailing, the joy and excitement, the ever ringing chorus of life which, if only he could interpret it, must make him famous for ever.  Night after night he listened, and drank it in greedily, thrilled through all his senses by this near contact with the great throbbing heart of the world.  Yet his pen was idle.  More than ever he realised that he had a long apprenticeship to serve.  There came a time when he threw down his manuscript and wandered out into the streets.  By such means alone could he gain knowledge and the power of knowledge.