tion in the
moonlit land, the more his own chivalric folly glowed in the night like
a great fire. Even the common things he carried with him--the food and
the brandy and the loaded pistol--took on exactly that concrete and
material poetry which a child feels when he takes a gun upon a journey
or a bun with him to bed. The sword-stick and the brandy-flask,
though in themselves only the tools of morbid conspirators, became the
expressions of his own more healthy romance. The sword-stick
became almost the sword of chivalry, and the brandy the wine of the
stirrup-cup. For even the most dehumanised modern fantasies depend
on some older and simpler figure; the adventures may be mad, but the
adventurer must be sane. The dragon without St. George would not even
be grotesque. So this inhuman landscape was only imaginative by the
presence of a man really human. To Syme's exaggerative mind the bright,
bleak houses and terraces by the Thames looked as empty as the mountains
of the moon. But even the moon is only poetical because there is a man
in the moon.

The tug was worked by two men, and with much toil went comparatively
slowly. The clear moon that had lit up Chiswick had gone down by the
time that they passed Battersea, and when they came under the enormous
bulk of Westminster day had already begun to break. It broke like the
splitting of great bars of lead, showing bars of silver; and these had
brightened like white fire when the tug, changing its onward course,
turned inward to a large landing stage rather beyond Charing Cross.

The great stones of the Embankment seemed equally dark and gigantic as
Syme looked up at them. They were big and black against the huge white
dawn. They made him feel that he was landing on the colossal steps of
some Egyptian palace; and, indeed, the thing suited his mood, for he
was, in his own mind, mounting to attack the solid thrones of horrible
and heathen kings. He leapt out of the boat on to one slimy step, and
stood, a dark and slender figure, amid the enormous masonry. The two men
in the tug put her off again and turned up stream. They had never spoken
a word.

CHAPTER V. THE FEAST OF FEAR

AT first the large stone stair seemed to Syme as deserted as a pyramid;
but before he reached the top he had realised that there was a man
leaning over the parapet of the Embankment and looking out across the
river. As a figure he was quite conventional, clad in a silk hat and
frock-coat of the m