coherency had snapped and left him peering about him vaguely, and a
little anxiously, as though he were afraid someone had overheard him.

"It has been very difficult--there were circumstances--so many
circumstances----" He sighed and finished on the toneless
parrot-note of the street orator: "My next meeting will be at Marble
Arch, 3 p.m., on Tuesday. Thank you for your attention, and
good-night."

He lifted his hat and bowed to left and right as though to an assembled
multitude. The lamp-light threw his shadow on to the grey, wet
pavements, and with the soap-box perched on his shoulders it was the
shadow of a huge hunchback. Then he shuffled off, and Stonehouse lost
sight of him almost at once in the dripping, uncertain darkness.

He walked on mechanically, aimlessly. He was tired out and dejected
beyond measure by this tragic encounter. It was not any immediate
affection for the old man, who had been no more to him than a strange
force driving him on for its own purposes; it was the others he had
evoked--and, above all, the sense of common misfortune which no man can
avert for ever. For the moment he lost faith in his own power to
maintain himself against a patient and faceless Nemesis.

It was morbid--the old terrifying signs of breakdown--the pointing
finger.

"Thus far and no further with your brain, Robert Stonehouse."


And then, suddenly, he found that he was in a familiar street, and,