It was night. Quite dark, save for the stars; the lights already
disappearing in the fringe of mean houses whose outline was merged
against the blackness of the town; the green and red and white disks
along the railway line behind the dim mass of the gasworks; the
occasional streak of conglomerate fireflies that was a tramcar; and
the red, remorseless glow of here and there a furnace that never was
extinct in the memory of man. And, save for the far shriek of
trains, the less remote and more frequent clanging of passing
tramcars along the road edged with the skeleton cottages, and,
startlingly near, the vain munching and dull footfall of the old
horse, all was still. Compared with home and Budge Street, it was
the reposeful quiet of the tomb. Barney Bill smoked for a time in
silence, while Paul sat with clenched fists and a beating heart. The
simplicity of the high adventure dazed him. All he had to do was to
walk away--walk and walk, free as a sparrow.

Presently Barney Bill slid from the footboard. "You stay here,
sonny, till I come back."

He limped away across the dim brickfield and sat down at the edge of
the hollow where the woman had been murdered. He had to think; to
decide a nice point of ethics. A vagrant seller of brooms and jute
mats, even though he does carry about with him "Cassell's Family
Reader" and "The Remains of Henry Kirke White," is distracted by few
psychological problems. Sufficient for the day is the physical
thereof. And when a man like Barney Bill is unencumbered by the
continuous feminine, the ordinary solution of life is simple. But
now the man had to switch his mind back to times before Paul was
born, when the eternal feminine had played the very devil with him,
when all sorts of passions and emotions had whirled his untrained