and
feelings, like his sensations in the House before his speech, were all as
it were muffled in a horrible way, as if they all came to him wrapped in
a sort of flannel coating, through which he could not cut. And all the
time there seemed to be within him two men at mortal grips with one
another; the man of faith in divine sanction and authority, on which all
his beliefs had hitherto hinged, and a desperate warm-blooded hungry
creature. He was very miserable, craving strangely for the society of
someone who could understand what he was feeling, .and, from long habit
of making no confidants, not knowing how to satisfy that craving.

It was dawn when he reached his rooms; and, sure that he would not sleep,
he did not even go to bed, but changed his clothes, made himself some
coffee, and sat down at the window which overlooked the flowered
courtyard.

In Middle Temple Hall a Ball was still in progress, though the glamour
from its Chinese lanterns was already darkened and gone. Miltoun saw a
man and a girl, sheltered by an old fountain, sitting out their last
dance. Her head had sunk on her partner's shoulder; their lips were
joined. And there floated up to the window the scent of heliotrope, with
the tune of the waltz that those two should have been dancing. This
couple so stealthily enlaced, the gleam of their furtively turned eyes,
the whispering of their lips, that stony niche below the twittering
sparrows, so cunningly sought out--it was the world he had abjured! When
he looked again, they--like a vision seen--had stolen away and gone; the
music too had ceased, there was no scent of heliotrope. In the stony
niche crouched a stray cat watching the twittering sparrows.

Miltoun went out, and, turning into the empty Strand, walked on--without
heeding where, till towards five o'clock he found himself on Putney
Bridge.

He rested there, leaning over the parapet, looking down at the grey
water. The sun was just breaking through the heat haze; early waggons
were passing, and already men were coming in to work. To what end did
the river wander up and down; and a human river flow across it twice
every day? To what end were men and women suffering? Of the full current
of this life Miltoun could no more see the aim, than that of the wheeling
gulls in the early sunlight.

Leaving the bridge he made towards Barnes Common. The night was still
ensnared there on the gorse bushes grey with cobwebs and starry dewdrops.