His nights were invariably spent at the sign of the Flagon in that dismal alley off Watling Street into which merest chance had led him in the first instance. What attraction the place could have held for him he would afterwards have found it difficult to define. There is little doubt that it was just his loneliness that impelled thither his desire for the only society that he knew to be available, a company of human beings in similar case to himself, who sought in the nepenthes of the wine-cup and in riotous debauch a temporary oblivion of their misery and desolation. Low though he might previously have come, neither was this the resort nor were the thieves and harlots by whom it was frequented the associates that he would ordinarily have chosen. Fortune, whose sport he had ever been, had flung him among these human derelicts; and there he continued, since the place afforded him the only thing he craved until death should--as he hoped--bring him final peace. The end came abruptly. One night--the seventh that he spent in that lewd haunt of recklessness--he drank more deeply even than his deep habit. As a consequence, when, at the host’s bidding, he lurched out into the dark alley, the last of all those roisterers to depart, his wits were drugged to the point of insensibility. He moved like an automaton, on legs that mechanically performed their function. Staggering under him, they bore his swaying body in long lurches down the lane, until he must have looked like some flimsy simulacrum of a man with which the wind made sport. Without apprehension or care of the direction in which he was moving, he came into Watling Street, crossed it, plunged into a narrow alley on the southern side, and reeled blindly onward until his feet struck an obstacle in their unconscious path. He pitched over it, and fell forward heavily upon his face. Lacking the will and the strength to rise again, he lay where he had fallen, and sank there into a lethargic sleep. A half-hour passed. It was the half-hour immediately before the dawn. Came a bell tinkling in the distance. Slowly it drew nearer, and a cry repeated at intervals might have been audible and intelligible to Holles had he been conscious. Soon to these were added other sounds: the melancholy creak of an axle that required greasing, and the slow clank and thud of hooves upon the cobbles. Nearer rang the cry upon the silent night: “Bring out your dead!” The vehicle halted at the mouth of the alley in which the Colonel lay, and a man advanced, holding a flaming link above his head so as to cast its ruddy glare hither and thither to search the dark corners of that by-way. This man beheld two bodies stretched upon the ground: the Colonel’s and the one over which the Colonel had stumbled. He shouted something over his shoulder and advanced again. He was followed a moment later by the cart, conducted by his fellow, who walked at the horse’s head, pulling at a short pipe.