intricacy of London spread like a
model below.

But now he was aware that the fluctuating vapour about him was something
more than vapour, and the temerarious excitement of his first essay
was shot with fear. For he perceived, at first indistinctly, and then
suddenly very clearly, that he was surrounded by FACES! that each roll
and coil of the seeming cloud-stuff was a face. And such faces! Faces of
thin shadow, faces of gaseous tenuity. Faces like those faces that glare
with intolerable strangeness upon the sleeper in the evil hours of his
dreams. Evil, greedy eyes that were full of a covetous curiosity, faces
with knit brows and snarling, smiling lips; their vague hands clutched
at Mr. Bessel as he passed, and the rest of their bodies was but an
elusive streak of trailing darkness. Never a word they said, never a
sound from the mouths that seemed to gibber. All about him they pressed
in that dreamy silence, passing freely through the dim mistiness that
was his body, gathering ever more numerously about him. And the shadowy
Mr. Bessel, now suddenly fear-stricken, drove through the silent, active
multitude of eyes and clutching hands.

So inhuman were these faces, so malignant their staring eyes, and
shadowy, clawing gestures, that it did not occur to Mr. Bessel to
attempt intercourse with these drifting creatures. Idiot phantoms, they
seemed, children of vain desire, beings unborn and forbidden the boon of
being, whose only expressions and gestures told of the envy and craving
for life that was their one link with existence.

It says much for his resolution that, amidst the swarming cloud of these
noiseless spirits of evil, he could still think of Mr. Vincey. He made
a violent effort of will and found himself, he knew not how, stooping
towards Staple Inn, saw Vincey sitting attentive and alert in his
arm-chair by the fire.

And clustering also about him, as they clustered ever about all that
lives and breathes, was another multitude of these vain voiceless
shadows, longing, desiring, seeking some loophole into life.

For a space Mr. Bessel sought ineffectually to attract his friend's
attention. He tried to get in front of his eyes, to move the objects in
his room, to touch him. But Mr. Vincey remained unaffected, ignorant of
the being that was so close to his own. The strange something that Mr.
Bessel has compared to a sheet of glass separated them impermeably.

And at last Mr. Bessel did a desperate thing. I ha