The old man turned to the window beside them, and watched the stations and the people as the train went on. He saw the news upon the placards, flaring under the flaring lights. He recited the headlines slowly to himself. They were associated dimly, he knew not why, with anxiety; they distressed him. Then there was a little darkness and a rumble, and he heard the name of Norwood. He recognised it at once, and got out, and stood irresolutely at the gate. The collector took the ticket out of his hand, and smiled. Mr Burden looked at him fixedly, wondering at his smile, and felt for a moment an angry wave of emotion. He took this man also for one of his enemies. But a muddled feeling of pleasant association came after. He took him foolishly for a friend, and smiled and nodded in reply. Then, by pure instinct, such as animals have, he found the way towards his home. He came up that familiar road, his head reeling, and a bond, as though of iron, oppressing it within; and, as he walked, he suffered some dull ache continually. His slow steps jarred him; and now and then those pulsating throbs that are Death’s artillery preparing his attack, hammered at the walls of his being. [Illustration: THE SERIOUS INDISPOSITION OF MR BURDEN IN THE TRAIN] He kept to one line of the pavement to make more sure; and once he thought: “Perhaps I am drunk.” For it flashed twice on him that he was something different from himself; and he mixed with a night forty years gone, when he had drunk a whole bottle of some kind of wine. He heard again his father’s anger; and it seemed to him, in a fantastic way, that he was about to meet that anger now—after all those years. The functions of humanity were breaking down in him: memory, connection, harmony. Oh, poor Mr Burden! He had not known what was meant by the preachers when they preached; he had not known what was before him when they talked of the Soul. Mr Burden had called it immortal in his recited creed, and very right had he been in so calling it, and he was to prove it right in astounding trials, but in so doing quite to pass beyond the meaning of his word or theirs. He came up that familiar road: he saw the gates of his own house—they both stood white in the evening. Habit (or ritual) the mistress of men sane, the good nurse of the last hours, carried him stumbling beyond the first gate. He passed the lodge, and, stumbling still, he reached the steps at his door. Here the old man would have sat down, as beggars do, to rest, had not habit still sustained and preserved his manhood: for never in his life had he done so strange a thing as to sit upon the doorsteps of a house.