Each of these, he knew, had his struggle to keep self-respect!  Or was it that they were unconscious of struggle or of self-respect, and just let things drift?  They looked like that, most of them!  And all his inherent contempt for the average or common welled up as he watched them.  Yes, they looked like that!  Ironically, the sight of those from whom he had desired the comfort of compromise, served instead to stimulate that part of him which refused to let him compromise.  They looked soft, soggy, without pride or will, as though they knew that life was too much for them, and had shamefully accepted the fact.  They so obviously needed to be told what they might do, and which way they should, go; they would accept orders as they accepted their work, or pleasures:  And the thought that he was now debarred from the right to give them orders, rankled in him furiously.  They, in their turn, glanced casually at his tall figure leaning against the parapet, not knowing how their fate was trembling in the balance.  His thin, sallow face, and hungry eyes gave one or two of them perhaps a feeling of interest or discomfort; but to most he was assuredly no more than any other man or woman in the hurly-burly.  That dark figure of conscious power struggling in the fetters of its own belief in power, was a piece of sculpture they had neither time nor wish to understand, having no taste for tragedy—­for witnessing the human spirit driven to the wall.

It was five o’clock before Miltoun left the Bridge, and passed, like an exile, before the gates of Church and State, on his way to his uncle’s Club.  He stopped to telegraph to Audrey the time he would be coming to-morrow afternoon; and on leaving the Post-Office, noticed in the window of the adjoining shop some reproductions of old Italian masterpieces, amongst them one of Botticelli’s ‘Birth of Venus.’  He had never seen that picture; and, remembering that she had told him it was her favourite, he stopped to look at it.  Averagely well versed in such matters, as became one of his caste, Miltoun had not the power of letting a work of art insidiously steal the private self from his soul, and replace it with the self of all the world; and he examined this far-famed presentment of the heathen goddess with aloofness, even irritation.  The drawing of the body seemed to him crude, the whole picture a little flat and Early; he did not like the figure of the Flora.  The golden serenity, and tenderness, of which she had spoken, left him cold.  Then he found himself looking at the face, and slowly, but with uncanny certainty, began to feel that he was looking at the face of Audrey herself.  The hair was golden and different, the eyes grey and different, the mouth a little fuller; yet—­it was her face; the same oval shape, the same far-apart, arched brows, the same strangely tender, elusive spirit.  And, as though offended, he turned and walked on.  In the window of that little shop was the effigy