knew that he would have to stop the
sooner. Alas! what more comic spectacle for the eyes of a good citizen
than this married man of middle age, striding for hours over those dry,
dark, empty pastures--hunted by passion and by pity, so that he knew not
even whether he had dined! But no good citizen was abroad of an autumn
night in a bitter easterly wind. The trees were the sole witnesses
of this grim exercise--the trees, resigning to the cold blast their
crinkled leaves that fluttered past him, just a little lighter than the
darkness. Here and there his feet rustled in the drifts, waiting their
turn to serve the little bonfires, whose scent still clung in the air.
A desperate walk, in this heart of London--round and round, up and down,
hour after hour, keeping always in the dark; not a star in the sky, not
a human being spoken to or even clearly seen, not a bird or beast;
just the gleam of the lights far away, and the hoarse muttering of the
traffic! A walk as lonely as the voyage of the human soul is lonely from
birth to death with nothing to guide it but the flickering glow from its
own frail spirit lighted it knows not where....

And, so tired that he could hardly move his legs, but free at last of
that awful feeling in his head--free for the first time for days and
days--Lennan came out of the Park at the gate where he had gone in, and
walked towards his home, certain that tonight, one way or the other, it
would be decided....

XV

This then--this long trouble of body and of spirit--was what he
remembered, sitting in the armchair beyond his bedroom fire, watching
the glow, and Sylvia sleeping there exhausted, while the dark plane-tree
leaves tap-tapped at the window in the autumn wind; watching, with
the uncanny certainty that, he would not pass the limits of this night
without having made at last a decision that would not alter. For even
conflict wears itself out; even indecision has this measure set to its
miserable powers of torture, that any issue in the end is better than
the hell of indecision itself. Once or twice in those last days even
death had seemed to him quite tolerable; but now that his head was clear
and he had come to grips, death passed out of his mind like the shadow
that it was. Nothing so simple, extravagant, and vain could serve him.
Other issues had reality; death--none. To leave Sylvia, and take this
young love away; there was reality in that, but it had always faded
as soon as it shape