So he had left the highroad, the beaten way of salvation many others had deserted, had flung off his spectacles, had plunged into reality, to be scratched and battered, to lose his way.  Not until now had something of grim zest come to him, of an instinct which was the first groping of a vision, as to where his own path might lie.  Through what thickets and over what mountains he knew not as yet—­nor cared to know.  He felt resistance, whereas on the highroad he had felt none.  On the highroad his cry had gone unheeded and unheard, yet by holding out his hand in the wilderness he had helped another, bruised and bleeding, to her feet!  Salvation, Let it be what it might be, he would go on, stumbling and seeking, through reality.

Even this last revelation, of Eldon Parr’s agency in another tragedy, seemed to have no further power to affect him. . .  Nor could Hodder think of Alison as in blood-relationship to the financier, or even to the boy, whose open, pleasure-loving face he had seen in the photograph.

II

A presage of autumn was in the air, and a fine, misty rain drifted in at his windows as he sat at his breakfast.  He took deep breaths of the moisture, and it seemed to water and revive his parching soul.  He found himself, to his surprise, surveying with equanimity the pile of books in the corner which had led him to the conviction of the emptiness of the universe—­but the universe was no longer empty!  It was cruel, but a warring force was at work in it which was not blind, but directed.  He could not say why this was so, but he knew it, he felt it, sensed its energy within him as he set out for Dalton Street.

He was neither happy nor unhappy, but in equilibrium, walking with sure steps, and the anxiety in which he had fallen asleep the night before was gone:  anxiety lest the woman should have fled, or changed her mind, or committed some act of desperation.

In Dalton Street a thin coat of yellow mud glistened on the asphalt, but even the dreariness of this neighbourhood seemed transient.  He rang the bell of the flat, the door swung open, and in the hall above a woman awaited him.  She was clad in black.

“You wouldn’t know me, would you?” she inquired.  “Say, I scarcely know myself.  I used to wear this dress at Pratt’s, with white collars and cuffs and—­well, I just put it on again.  I had it in the bottom of my trunk, and I guessed you’d like it.”

“I didn’t know you at first,” he said, and the pleasure in his face was her reward.

The transformation, indeed, was more remarkable than he could have believed possible, for respectability itself would seem to have been regained by a costume, and the abundance of her remarkable hair was now repressed.  The absence of paint made her cheeks strangely white, the hollows under the eyes darker.  The eyes themselves alone betrayed the woman of yesterday; they still burned.