and to pace the room. Presently I got to stopping my ears with
my fingers.

The emotional appeal of those yells grew upon me steadily,
grew at last to such an exquisite expression of suffering that I
could stand it in that confined room no longer. I stepped
out of the door into the slumberous heat of the late afternoon,
and walking past the main entrance--locked again, I noticed--turned
the corner of the wall.

The crying sounded even louder out of doors. It was as if all the pain
in the world had found a voice. Yet had I known such pain was in
the next room, and had it been dumb, I believe--I have thought since--I
could have stood it well enough. It is when suffering finds a voice
and sets our nerves quivering that this pity comes troubling us.
But in spite of the brilliant sunlight and the green fans of the trees
waving in the soothing sea-breeze, the world was a confusion,
blurred with drifting black and red phantasms, until I was out of earshot
of the house in the chequered wall.




IX. THE THING IN THE FOREST.


I STRODE through the undergrowth that clothed the ridge behind the house,
scarcely heeding whither I went; passed on through the shadow of a thick
cluster of straight-stemmed trees beyond it, and so presently found
myself some way on the other side of the ridge, and descending towards