for
dreams, this, and yet he felt the misery sweeping in upon him, felt all
the cold shivers of his ineffective struggles. Slowly that fateful
panorama unfolded itself before his memory. He saw himself step out with
glad relief from the uncomfortable, nauseous, third-class carriage, and,
clutching his humble little present in his hand, cross the flinty
platform, climb the long, rain-swept hill, keeping his head upraised,
though the very sky seemed grimy, battling against the miserable
depression of that everlasting ugliness. Before him, at least, there
was his one companion. There would be kind words, sympathy, a cheerful
fireside, a little dreaming, a little wandering into that world which
they had made for themselves with the help of such treasures as that
cheap little volume he carried. And then the last few steps, the open
door, the room, its air at first of wonderful comfort, and then the queer
note of luxury obtruding itself disquietingly, the picture on the
mantelpiece, her coming. He had never been in love with Beatrice. He knew
that now perfectly well. He had simply clung to her because she was the
only living being who knew and understood, because they had mingled their
thoughts and trodden the path of misery together. Removed now from that
blaze of passion, smouldering perhaps in him through previous years of
discontent, but which leaped into actual and effective life for the first
time in those few moments, he realised a certain justice in her point of
view, a certain hard logic in the way she had spoken of life and their
relations. There had been so little real affection between them. So
little had passed which might have constituted a greater bond. It was his
passionate outburst of revolt against life, whose drear talons seemed to
have fastened themselves into his very soul, which had sent him out with
murder in his brain to seek the man who had robbed him of the one thing
which stood between him and despair; the pent-up fury of a lifetime which
had tingled in his blood and had given him the strength of the navvy in
those few minutes by the canal side.

He covered his face with his hands, strode around the room, gazing wildly
out over the city, trying to listen to the clanging of the surface cars,
the rumble of the overhead railway in the distance, the breaking of the
long, ceaseless waves of human feet upon the pavement. It was useless. No
effort of his will could keep from his brain the haunting memory o