d every minute, as I sat silent
and listened, my heart sank lower and lower, descending relentlessly
like a clock-weight into my boot soles.

Throughout my agony I never dreamed of resorting to a direct question,
much less a reproach. Even during the period of joyful anticipation some
fear of breaking the spell had kept me from any bald circus talk in the
presence of them. But Harold, who was built in quite another way, so
soon as he discerned the drift of their conversation and heard the knell
of all his hopes, filled the room with wail and clamour of bereavement.
The grinning welkin rang with "Circus!" "Circus!" shook the
window-panes; the mocking walls re-echoed "Circus!" Circus he would
have, and the whole circus, and nothing but the circus. No compromise
for him, no evasions, no fallacious, unsecured promises to pay. He had
drawn his cheque on the Bank of Expectation, and it had got to be cashed
then and there; else he would yell, and yell himself into a fit, and
come out of it and yell again. Yelling should be his profession, his
art, his mission, his career. He was qualified, he was resolute, and he
was in no hurry to retire from the business.

The noisy ones of the world, if they do not always shout themselves into
the imperial purple, are sure at least of receiving attention. If they
cannot sell everything at their own price, one thing--silence--must, at
any cost, be purchased of them. Harold accordingly had to be consoled
by the employment of every specious fallacy and base-born trick known to
those whose doom it is to handle children. For me their hollow cajolery
had no interest, I could pluck no consolation out of their bankrupt
though prodigal pledges I only waited till that hateful, well-known
"Some other time, dear!" told me that hope was finally dead. Then I left
the room without any remark. It made it worse--if anything could--to
hear that stale, worn-out old phrase, still supposed by those dullards
to have some efficacy.

To nature, as usual, I drifted by instinct, and there, out of the track
of humanity, under a friendly hedge-row had my black hour unseen. The
world was a globe no longer, space was no more filled with whirling
circuses of spheres. That day the old beliefs rose up and asserted
themselves, and the earth was flat again--ditch-riddled, stagnant, and
deadly flat. The undeviating roads crawled straight and white, elms
dressed themselves stiffly along inflexible hedges, all nature,
centri