As Loder walked onward, treading the whole familiar length of traffic-filled street, he realized for the first time that he was standing before that solemn tribunal that the hour had come when he must answer to himself for himself.  The longer and deeper an oblivion the more painful the awakening.  For months the song of self had beaten about his ears, deadening all other sounds; now abruptly that song had ceased—­not considerately, not lingeringly, but with a suddenness that made the succeeding silence very terrible.

He walked onward, keeping his direction unseeingly.  He was passing through the fire as surely as though actual flames rose about his feet; and whatever the result, whatever the fibre of the man who emerged from the ordeal, the John Loder who had hewn his way through the past weeks would exist no more.  The triumphant egotist—­the strong man—­who, by his own strength, had kept his eyes upon one point, refusing to see in other directions, had ceased to be.

Keen though it was, his realization of this crisis in his life had come with characteristic slowness.  When Lillian Astrupp had given her dictum, when the music of the orchestra had ceased and the curtain risen on the second act of the play, nothing but a sense of stupefaction had filled his mind.  In that moment the great song was silenced, not by any portentous episode, not by any incident that could have lent dignity to its end, but—­with the full measure of life’s irony—­by a trivial social commonplace.  In the first sensation of blank loss his faculties had been numbed; in the quarter of an hour that followed the rise of the curtain he had sat staring at the stage, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, filled with the enormity of the void that suddenly surrounded him.  Then, from habit, from constitutional tendency, he had begun slowly and perseveringly to draw first one thread and then another from the tangle of his thoughts—­to forge with doubt and difficulty the chain that was to draw him towards the future.

It was upon this same incomplete and yet tenacious chain that his mind worked as he traversed the familiar streets and at last gained the house he had so easily learned to call home.

As he inserted the latch-key and felt it move smoothly in the lock, a momentary revolt against his own judgment, his own censorship swung him sharply towards reaction.  But it is only the blind who can walk without a tremor on the edge of an abyss, and there was no longer a bandage across his eyes.  The reaction flared up like a strip of lighted paper; then, like a strip of lighted paper, it dropped back to ashes.  He pushed the door open and slowly crossed the hall.

The mounting of a staircase is often the index to a man’s state of mind.  As Loder ascended the stairs of Chilcote’s house his shoulders lacked their stiffness, his head was no longer erect; he moved as though his feet were weighted.  He had ceased to be the man of achievement whose smallest opinion compels consideration; in the privacy of solitude he was the mere human flotsam to which he had once compared himself—­the flotsam that, dreaming it has found a harbor, wakes to find itself the prey of the incoming tide.