"Soames," he said as to an underling, but without turning his face,
"put those knives straight!"

With an inhibitive gesture to my friend, "Mr. Soames," I said
emphatically to the devil, "is a Catholic diabolist"; but my poor
friend did the devil's bidding, not mine; and now, with his master's eyes
again fixed on him, he arose, he shuffled past me. I tried to speak. It
was he that spoke. "Try," was the prayer he threw back at me as the devil
pushed him roughly out through the door--"TRY to make them
know that I did exist!"

In another instant I, too, was through that door. I stood staring all
ways, up the street, across it, down it. There was moonlight and
lamplight, but there was not Soames nor that other.

Dazed, I stood there. Dazed, I turned back at length into the little
room, and I suppose I paid Berthe or Rose for my dinner and luncheon
and for Soames's; I hope so, for I never went to the Vingtieme
again. Ever since that night I have avoided Greek Street altogether. And
for years I did not set foot even in Soho Square, because on that same
night it was there that I paced and loitered, long and long, with
some such dull sense of hope as a man has in not straying far from the
place where he has lost something. "Round and round the shutter'd
Square"--that line came back to me on my lonely beat, and with it the
whole stanza, ringing in my brain and bearing in on me how tragically
different from the happy scene imagined by him was the poet's actual
experience of that prince in whom of all princes we should put not our
trust!

But strange how the mind of an essayist, be it never so stricken,