or the invisible
descending sun. Moment after moment the rifts grew longer, the tones
grew warmer; above began to spread a rosy flush; in front, the glory
brightened, touching the cloud-line above it with a tender crimson.

If all days could be like this! One could live so well, he thought, in
mere enjoyment of the beauty of earth and sky, all else forgotten.
Under this soft-dusking heaven, death was welcome rest, and passion
only a tender sadness.

He said to himself that he had grown old in hopeless love--only to
doubt in the end whether he had loved at all.

CHAPTER XXXI

The lad he employed in his office was run over by a cab one slippery
day, and all but killed. Piers visited him in the hospital, thus seeing
for the first time the interior of one of those houses of pain, which
he always disliked even to pass. The experience did not help to
brighten his mood; he lacked that fortunate temper of the average man,
which embraces as a positive good the less of two evils. The long,
grey, low-echoing ward, with its atmosphere of antiseptics; the rows of
little white camp-beds, an ominous screen hiding this and that; the
bloodless faces, the smothered groan, made a memory that went about
with him for many a day.

It strengthened his growing hatred of London, a huge battlefield
calling itself the home of civilisation and of peace; battlefield on
which the wounds were of soul no less than of body. In these gaunt
streets along which he passed at night, how many a sad heart suffered,
by the dim glimmer that showed at upper windows, a hopeless solitude
amid the innumerable throng! Human cattle, the herd that feed and
breed, with them it was well; but the few born to a desire for ever
unattainable, the gentle spirits who from their prisoning circumstance
looked up and afar how the heart ached to think of them! Some girl, of
delicate instinct, of purpose sweet and pure, wasting her unloved life
in toil and want and indignity; some man, whose youth and courage
strove against a mean environment, whose eyes grew haggard in the vain
search for a companion promised in his dreams; they lived, these two,
parted perchance only by the wall of neighbour houses, yet all huge
London was between them, and their hands would never touch. Beside this
hunger for love, what was the stomach-famine of a multitude that knew
no other?

The spring drew nigh, and Otway dreaded its coming. It was the time of
his burning torment, of imaginati