sea. The eternal and insoluble question troubled and teased him, and
would not be put aside. In imagination, he felt the very swish of the
planet as it whirled through space with its cargo of pitiful humanity.
What, after all, were life, love, ambition, grief, death? What, in the
incessant march of suns, could be the value of a few restless specks of
vitality clinging with desperation to a minor orb?

And then he fancied he could hear a sound within the flat, and he forgot
these transcendental speculations, and for him the secret of the
universe lay behind the blinds of Francis Tudor's drawing-room. Yes, he
could hear a sound. It was the distant sound of a man talking--loudly,
slowly, and distinctly--but too far off for him to catch even one word.
He guessed, as he pushed the window a little wider open, and bent his
ear to the aperture, that the voice must be in a room beyond the
drawing-room. It continued monotonously for a long time, with little
breaks at rare intervals; it was rather like a parson reading a sermon
in an empty church. Then it ceased. And there were footsteps, which
approached the window, and retired. He noticed that the light within the
room was being moved, but it cast no human shadow on the blind. The
light came finally to a standstill, and then there followed sounds which
Hugo could not diagnose--short, regular sounds, broken occasionally by a
sharp clash, as of an instrument falling. And when these had come to an
end, there were more footsteps--a precise, quick walking to and fro,
which continued for ages of time. Lastly, the footsteps receded;
something dropped, not heavily, but rather in a manner gently subsiding,
and a groan (or was it a moan, a tired suspiration?) wakened in Hugo's
spinal column a curious, strange thrill. Then silence, complete,
definitive, terrifying.

By merely pushing the window against the blind, he could enter and know