“I can’t help feeling that he may be lying there dead, or delirious, or something.” “And I can’t help feeling that he must have gone out to dinner. We shall have to give him up, I’m afraid. It’s a pity. He’s so good with Mercaptan. Like bear and mastiff. Or rather, like bear and poodle, bear and King Charles’s spaniel—or whatever those little dogs are that you see ladies in eighteenth-century French engravings taking to bed with them. Let’s go.” “Just knock once again,” said Mrs. Viveash. “He might really be preoccupied, or asleep, or ill.” Gumbril knocked. “Now listen. Hush.” They were silent; the children still went on hallooing in the distance. There was a great clop-clopping of horse’s feet as a van was backed into a stable door near by. Lypiatt stood motionless, his arms still crossed, his chin on his breast. The seconds passed. “Not a sound,” said Gumbril. “He must have gone out.” “I suppose so,” said Mrs. Viveash. “Come on, then. We’ll go and look for Mercaptan.” He heard their steps in the street below, heard the slamming of the taxi door. The engine was started up. Loud on the first gear, less loud on the second, whisperingly on the third, it moved away, gathering speed. The noise of it was merged with the general noise of the town. They were gone. Lypiatt walked slowly back to his bed. He wished suddenly that he had gone down to answer the last knock. These voices—at the well’s edge he had turned to listen to them; at the well’s extreme verge. He lay quite still in the darkness; and it seemed to him at last that he had floated away from the earth, that he was alone, no longer in a narrow dark room, but in an illimitable darkness outside and beyond. His mind grew calmer; he began to think of himself, of all that he had known, remotely, as though from a great way off. “Adorable lights!” said Mrs. Viveash, as they drove once more through Piccadilly Circus. Gumbril said nothing. He had said all that he had to say last time. “And there’s another,” exclaimed Mrs. Viveash, as they passed, near Burlington House, a fountain of Sandeman’s port. “If only they had an automatic jazz band attached to the same mechanism!” she said regretfully. The Green Park remained solitary and remote under the moon. “Wasted on us,” said Gumbril, as they passed. “One should be happily in love to enjoy a summer night under the trees.” He wondered where Emily could be now. They sat in silence; the cab drove on.