in him.  Then something writhed and cried within, as a tortured beast cries, at loss to know why it is being tortured.  How many times has not a man used those words:  “My God!  My God!  Why hast Thou forsaken me!” He sprang up and tried to pace his way out of this cage of confusion:  His thoughts and feelings made the strangest medley, spiritual and worldly—­Social ostracism—­her soul in peril—­a trial sent by God!  The future!  Imagination failed him.  He went to his little piano, opened it, closed it again; took his hat, and stole out.  He walked fast, without knowing where.  It was very cold—­a clear, bitter evening.  Silent rapid motion in the frosty air was some relief.  As Noel had fled from him, having uttered her news, so did he fly from her.  The afflicted walk fast.  He was soon down by the river, and turned West along its wall.  The moon was up, bright and nearly full, and the steel-like shimmer of its light burnished the ebbing water.  A cruel night!  He came to the Obelisk, and leaned against it, overcome by a spasm of realisation.  He seemed to see his dead wife’s face staring at him out of the past, like an accusation.  “How have you cared for Nollie, that she should have come to this?” It became the face of the moonlit sphinx, staring straight at him, the broad dark face with wide nostrils, cruel lips, full eyes blank of pupils, all livened and whitened by the moonlight—­an embodiment of the marvellous unseeing energy of Life, twisting and turning hearts without mercy.  He gazed into those eyes with a sort of scared defiance.  The great clawed paws of the beast, the strength and remorseless serenity of that crouching creature with human head, made living by his imagination and the moonlight, seemed to him like a temptation to deny God, like a refutation of human virtue.

Then, the sense of beauty stirred in him; he moved where he could see its flanks coated in silver by the moonlight, the ribs and the great muscles, and the tail with tip coiled over the haunch, like the head of a serpent.  It was weirdly living; fine and cruel, that great man-made thing.  It expressed something in the soul of man, pitiless and remote from love—­or rather, the remorselessness which man had seen, lurking within man’s fate.  Pierson recoiled from it, and resumed his march along the Embankment, almost deserted in the bitter cold.  He came to where, in the opening of the Underground railway, he could see the little forms of people moving, little orange and red lights glowing.  The sight arrested him by its warmth and motion.  Was it not all a dream?  That woman and her daughter, had they really come?  Had not Noel been but an apparition, her words a trick which his nerves had played him?  Then, too vividly again, he saw her face against the dark stuff of the curtain, the curve of her hand plucking at her blouse, heard the sound of his own horrified:  “Nollie!” No illusion, no deception!  The edifice of his life was in the dust.  And a queer and ghastly