Bosinney walked right out into the thoroughfare—­a vast muffled blackness, where a man could not see six paces before him; where, all around, voices or whistles mocked the sense of direction; and sudden shapes came rolling slow upon them; and now and then a light showed like a dim island in an infinite dark sea.

And fast into this perilous gulf of night walked Bosinney, and fast after him walked George.  If the fellow meant to put his ‘twopenny’ under a ’bus, he would stop it if he could!  Across the street and back the hunted creature strode, not groping as other men were groping in that gloom, but driven forward as though the faithful George behind wielded a knout; and this chase after a haunted man began to have for George the strangest fascination.

But it was now that the affair developed in a way which ever afterwards caused it to remain green in his mind.  Brought to a stand-still in the fog, he heard words which threw a sudden light on these proceedings.  What Mrs. Soames had said to Bosinney in the train was now no longer dark.  George understood from those mutterings that Soames had exercised his rights over an estranged and unwilling wife in the greatest—­the supreme act of property.

His fancy wandered in the fields of this situation; it impressed him; he guessed something of the anguish, the sexual confusion and horror in Bosinney’s heart.  And he thought:  ’Yes, it’s a bit thick!  I don’t wonder the poor fellow is half-cracked!’

He had run his quarry to earth on a bench under one of the lions in Trafalgar Square, a monster sphynx astray like themselves in that gulf of darkness.  Here, rigid and silent, sat Bosinney, and George, in whose patience was a touch of strange brotherliness, took his stand behind.  He was not lacking in a certain delicacy—­a sense of form—­that did not permit him to intrude upon this tragedy, and he waited, quiet as the lion above, his fur collar hitched above his ears concealing the fleshy redness of his cheeks, concealing all but his eyes with their sardonic, compassionate stare.  And men kept passing back from business on the way to their clubs—­men whose figures shrouded in cocoons of fog came into view like spectres, and like spectres vanished.  Then even in his compassion George’s Quilpish humour broke forth in a sudden longing to pluck these spectres by the sleeve, and say: 

“Hi, you Johnnies!  You don’t often see a show like this!  Here’s a poor devil whose mistress has just been telling him a pretty little story of her husband; walk up, walk up!  He’s taken the knock, you see.”

In fancy he saw them gaping round the tortured lover; and grinned as he thought of some respectable, newly-married spectre enabled by the state of his own affections to catch an inkling of what was going on within Bosinney; he fancied he could see his mouth getting wider and wider, and the fog going down and down.  For in George was all that contempt of the of the married middle-class—­peculiar to the wild and sportsmanlike spirits in its ranks.