turning a corner, he came upon a crowd of people gathered round some
object in the road, and at once said to himself, this is it, here it
is. He could not, however, see what it actually was, for the people,
who were muttering to themselves in angry tones, strove to keep him
back. At all costs, he felt, he must get nearer to the mysterious
thing, and, in a spirit of bravado, he was pushing through the crowd
to reach it, when a great clamour arose; every one sprang back, and
fled wildly, shrieking: "Moloch, Moloch!" He did not know in the least
what it meant, but the very strangeness of the word added to the
horror, and he, too, fled with the rest; fled blindly, desperately, up
streets and down, watched, it seemed to him, from every window by a
cold, malignant eye, but never daring to turn his head, lest he should
see the awful thing behind him; fled on and on, through streets that
grew ever vaguer and more shadowy, till at last his feet would carry
him no further: he sank down, with a loud cry, sank down, down, down,
and wakened to find that he was sitting up in bed, clammy with fear,
and that dawn was stealing in at the sides of the window.




II.



In Maurice Guest, it might be said that the smouldering unrest of two
generations burst into flame. As a young man, his father, then a poor
teacher in a small provincial town, had been a prey to certain dreams
and wishes, which harmonised ill with the conditions of his life.
When, for example, on a mild night, he watched the moon scudding a