He was now more sensible of her life than he had been in the days when she had been his, lost in emotion on his breast. By a strange kind of soul-transposition he suffered from the sorrows of a mistress whose joys he had been unable to share. He abode in thought within that sick heart, and the feeling of pity became so strong and full that it overflowed from him upon all life. When in the evening he walked along the streets and reached the sinister corners of the Haymarket and Regent Street, the sight of the girls of different nationalities wandering there in all weathers moved him to the bottom of his soul. They walked in their dark toilets and accosted the passers-by in every idiom. There were tall, heavy Germans, delicate Frenchwomen, and Englishwomen recognisable by faces that had often retained an expression of purity. The majority were old, with fierce gleaming in their gaze. What lamentable adventures--criminal ones, perhaps--had cast these foreigners, far from their native lands and beneath an ever-gloomy sky, upon the pavement of these streets, pitilessly traversed by the busy work of commerce? And the young, with profiles as of angels--for there were some such--how melancholy to see them pushing open the bar-doors, and drinking large glasses of brandy at a draught! They came out with a little colour on their cheeks and resumed their pilgrimage of infamy, warmed by the draught of alcohol against the rude climate, the sudden showers, the penetrating fog. Armand watched them going and coming, accosting this man, abusing that, and talking among themselves. There was a whole populace of these lost ones passing through the streets. Yes, lost ones, for nothing can save them any more than the prostitutes of luxury who go in pursuit of men with diamonds and horses, or the adulteresses, those victims of the search for new sensations. Nothing can save them, for there is nothing that can save! Sometimes, however, the young man chanced to pass in front of temples and to remember that thousands of beings believe in a Saviour. "But if I do not believe in Him," he asked himself, "is it my fault? A true Saviour would be one who saved even the incredulous, even the renegades, even the rebellious, even those who do not repent, seeing that they are most to be pitied! No, there is no redemption, and Christ has died in vain!"