outside, he took frankly to his heels.

At the corner of the Broad, he looked back over his shoulder. He had
half expected a scarlet figure skimming in pursuit. There was nothing.
He halted. Before him, the Broad lay empty beneath the moon. He went
slowly, mechanically, to his rooms.

The high grim busts of the Emperors stared down at him, their faces
more than ever tragically cavernous and distorted. They saw and read
in that moonlight the symbols on his breast. As he stood on his
doorstep, waiting for the door to be opened, he must have seemed to
them a thing for infinite compassion. For were they not privy to the
doom that the morrow, or the morrow's morrow, held for him--held not
indeed for him alone, yet for him especially, as it were, and for him
most lamentably?


IV

The breakfast-things were not yet cleared away. A plate freaked with
fine strains of marmalade, an empty toast-rack, a broken roll--these
and other things bore witness to a day inaugurated in the right
spirit.

Away from them, reclining along his window-seat, was the Duke. Blue
spirals rose from his cigarette, nothing in the still air to trouble
them. From their railing, across the road, the Emperors gazed at him.

For a young man, sleep is a sure solvent of distress. There whirls not
for him in the night any so hideous a phantasmagoria as will not