Sahara, a running
gazelle killed by a falcon. The falcon, rising high in the blue air,
had followed the gazelle, had circled, poised, then shot down and, with
miraculous skill, struck into the gazelle's eye. Unerringly from above
it had chosen out of the vast desert the home for its cruel beak.
Somewhat in similar fashion, so Malling thought, Stepton rose above
things, circled, poised, sank, and struck into the heart of the truth
unerringly.

Perhaps he was able to do this because he was able to mount, falconwise!

Malling would have given a good deal to have Stepton with him in this
affair, despite the professor's repellent attitude toward the amateur.
Well, if there really was anything in it, if strangeness rose out of the
orthodox bosom of St. Joseph's, if he--Malling--found himself walking in
thick darkness, he meant to bring Stepton into the matter, whether at
Stepton's desire or against it. Meanwhile he would see if there was
enlightenment in Hornton Street.

On the Wednesday the spell of fine weather which had made London look
strangely vivacious broke up, and in the evening rain fell with a gentle
persistence. Blank grayness took the town. A breath as of deep autumn was
in the air. And the strange sadness of cities, which is like no other
sadness, held the spirit of Evelyn Malling as he walked under an umbrella
in the direction of Kensington High Street. He walked, to shake off
depression. But in his effort he did not succeed. All that he saw
deepened his melancholy; the soldiers starting out vaguely from barracks,
not knowing what to do, but free for a time, and hoping, a little
heavily, for some adventure to break the military monotony of their
lives; the shopgirls, also in hope of something to "take them out of
themselves"--pathetic desire of escape from the little prison, where the
soul sits, picking its oakum sometimes, in its cell of flesh!--young
men making for the parks, workmen for the public houses, an old woman,
in a cap, peering out of an upper window in Prince's Gate; Italians with
an organ, and a monkey that looked as if it were dying of nostalgia;
women hurrying--whither?--with anxious faces, and bodies whose very
shapes, and whose every movement, suggested, rather proclaimed, worry.

Malling knew it was the rain, the possessive grayness, which troubled his
body to-night, and through his body troubled his spirit. His nostrils
inhaled the damp, and it seemed to go straight into his essence, into