egnant
with meaning.

Gradually, as he moved through the hurrying crowd, he was conscious of a
name constantly on their lips. It was muttered by the voices of tipsy
men reeling from their vile dens of intoxication, by the lips of painted
women as they drew their furs around their tawdry finery, by the
artisans with their pinched faces and hungry eyes, by all the classes to
whom life is a bitter struggle with poverty and necessity.

To and fro he seemed to move, without haste, and yet with the rapidity
of thought. In the magnificence of gilded saloons, in the snow-covered
street, in the haunts of poverty and vice, always and always that one
word was tossed to and fro in every accent of hate and opprobrium. And
when in wonder he turned to the shape floating still beside him, and
would have questioned the meaning of that word, it stayed the question
on his lips with a mute gesture of silence.

Then, strange to say, he seemed to gather into his own consciousness a
sense of deep implacable hatred. A hatred that thrilled the air as with
poisoned breath, and beat in the pulses of living men to whom existence
was brutalised by tyranny and vice. The sense of this awful murderous
Hate, at last grew terrible as a burden, so fully and consciously did he
recognise it, so clearly did he see of what it was capable, and so
mysteriously did it seem to breathe about the very air through which he
moved.

It filled the pulses of the night with a horror from which he shrank
aghast, it stretched a blood-red hand over the white drifts of unsullied
snow, it painted out the brilliant hues of luxury, and threw yet darker
shadows over the sad homes of want and misery and crime.

And more and more he strained every nerve to catch the meaning of that
word which was its embodiment, and again and again he failed.

Suddenly the scene changed. He was in a poor chamber, barely and
miserably furnished. It lay in the centre of a pile of buildings facing
a half-frozen canal. It seemed to him that the building consisted of
hosts of small tenements, all swarming with human life, but he had
passed up the common stairway seemingly unnoticed, and entered this
special room.

It was tenanted by two people. An old woman of some three-score years,
with a thin worn face and grey hair banded over her hollow temples. She
was thinly clad, and had an old tippet of yellow fur over her shoulders.
She sat near the stove. Before her stood a young man in t