Now that Audrey Noel was lost to him, her loveliness and that indescribable quality which made her lovable, floated before him, the very torture-flowers of a beauty never to be grasped—­yet, that he could grasp, ’if he only would!  That was the heart and fervour of his suffering.  To be grasped if he only would!  He was suffering, too, physically from a kind of slow fever, the result of his wetting on the day when he last saw her.  And through that latent fever, things and feelings, like his sensations in the House before his speech, were all as it were muffled in a horrible way, as if they all came to him wrapped in a sort of flannel coating, through which he could not cut.  And all the time there seemed to be within him two men at mortal grips with one another; the man of faith in divine sanction and authority, on which all his beliefs had hitherto hinged, and a desperate warm-blooded hungry creature.  He was very miserable, craving strangely for the society of someone who could understand what he was feeling, .and, from long habit of making no confidants, not knowing how to satisfy that craving.

It was dawn when he reached his rooms; and, sure that he would not sleep, he did not even go to bed, but changed his clothes, made himself some coffee, and sat down at the window which overlooked the flowered courtyard.

In Middle Temple Hall a Ball was still in progress, though the glamour from its Chinese lanterns was already darkened and gone.  Miltoun saw a man and a girl, sheltered by an old fountain, sitting out their last dance.  Her head had sunk on her partner’s shoulder; their lips were joined.  And there floated up to the window the scent of heliotrope, with the tune of the waltz that those two should have been dancing.  This couple so stealthily enlaced, the gleam of their furtively turned eyes, the whispering of their lips, that stony niche below the twittering sparrows, so cunningly sought out—­it was the world he had abjured!  When he looked again, they—­like a vision seen—­had stolen away and gone; the music too had ceased, there was no scent of heliotrope.  In the stony niche crouched a stray cat watching the twittering sparrows.

Miltoun went out, and, turning into the empty Strand, walked on—­without heeding where, till towards five o’clock he found himself on Putney Bridge.

He rested there, leaning over the parapet, looking down at the grey water.  The sun was just breaking through the heat haze; early waggons were passing, and already men were coming in to work.  To what end did the river wander up and down; and a human river flow across it twice every day?  To what end were men and women suffering?  Of the full current of this life Miltoun could no more see the aim, than that of the wheeling gulls in the early sunlight.

Leaving the bridge he made towards Barnes Common.  The night was still ensnared there on the gorse bushes grey with cobwebs and starry dewdrops.  He passed a tramp family still sleeping, huddled all together.  Even the homeless lay in each other’s arms!