His old red woollen bell-rope lay in a heap on the floor. That also had happened as a result of my studies in the British Museum. I busied myself with it.... By the time he had returned I had made it quite ready and was gazing thoughtfully into his fireplace. I went downstairs with Jane, who herself closed the door behind me. I gave her a very express good-night. * * * * * The remainder of that evening I can divide into four distinct stages, and I will adopt that course, taking them numerically. The first stage was one of an almost overwhelming lassitude. I had an hour and a half and more to kill, and this lassitude came upon me suddenly as I walked slowly in the direction of Cheapside. I was in its power before I recognised its dangers. The man of action had suddenly sunk into abeyance with me, and, now that all was ready, all interest in my job had departed from me. The drudgery of actual performance was all at once beyond my powers. I could have gone on planning--I wished there had been more to plan--but now to carry out.... I collapsed suddenly. Why (I asked myself wearily) trouble after all! Why trouble about anything? Life was short, yet already too long; its activities overlauded, its glories contemptibly little; why waste it in striving--nay, why live it all? Thirty years of it had brought me nothing; whatever another thirty years might bring me I should have to leave, and what would it matter after that whether I left much or little? Nay, were there really an Infinite Mercy to be "squared," it was perhaps better to cast myself before it helpless, naked, and without profit of my life. Why not end it all now? Why not kill, not Archie, but myself? I turned with bowed head down the Minories, and something within me--I think it was that honest and beaten and bloody-minded Jeffries--whispered "The River!" Presently I stood not far from the Tower, looking over a parapet into the dark water. Yes, the river would settle it, that was the real way out. No more Agency clerkships and red-and-green-lighted apartments and sham betrothals on the other side of that parapet. And no more heartrending strivings to be free of the circumstances into which the world malignantly thrust me back the moment I raised my head. Striving? I realised all my striving in the past--Rixon Tebb & Masters', the Method examination, my commissionaireship, the wanton slander, my late perfected plan--and the thought that the years to come might be but repetitions of all this hit me like a hammer. I could not face it. Then a detached sentence from one of the books I had read in the museum sprang up in my mind, and I started a little. The sentence was to the effect that a man who leaps into water always removes his hat before doing so. I did not remember that I had taken my own hat off, but there it lay, on the parapet, at my elbow.