social pleasure. They were yet in the first fair holiday of life.
Life's holiday had gone from him forever. Graver men, in the various
callings of masculine labour--professions, trade, the State--passed him
also. Their steps might be sober, and their faces careworn; but no step
had the furtive stealth of his, no face the same contracted, sinister,
suspicious gloom. Only once, in a lonely thoroughfare, and on the
opposite side of the way, fell a footfall, and glanced an eye, that
seemed to betray a soul in sympathy with Randal Leslie's.

And Randal, who had heeded none of the other passengers by the way, as if
instinctively, took note of this one. His nerves crisped at the noise-
less slide of that form, as it stalked on from lamp to lamp, keeping pace
with his own. He felt a sort of awe, as if he had beheld the wraith of
himself; and even as he glanced suspiciously at the stranger, the
stranger glanced at him. He was inexpressibly relieved when the figure
turned down another street and vanished.

That man was a felon, as yet undetected. Between him and his kind there
stood but a thought,--a veil air-spun, but impassable, as the veil of the
Image at Sais.

And thus moved and thus looked Randal Leslie, a thing of dark and secret
mischief, within the pale of the law, but equally removed from man by the
vague consciousness that at his heart lay that which the eyes of man
would abhor and loathe. Solitary amidst the vast city, and on through
the machinery of Civilization, went the still spirit of Intellectual
Evil.