So closely wrapped in his own thoughts was the lounger that it was many seconds after they had been uttered before the words succeeded in penetrating to his consciousness. The last sound of the youths’ trampling feet had died away at the end of the bridge before he woke up sufficiently to ask himself with a resentful air: “What made him say that?” He found himself unable to dismiss the jeer from his mind, in which it went on echoing with such tormenting insistence that at last he stood up and shook himself, unconsciously making a physical effort to change the pattern in the brain’s kaleidoscope. But the suggestion which so irritated him was not to be got rid of in that fashion. It chimed in too well with the whole tenor of his meditation since he had found his way on to the bridge. The half-formed questions which had been baffling his attempts to give them definite shape now all at once began to come together and settle down into one question, precipitated, as it were, by that profane mockery. “Why,” he reflected, with a growing sense of anger at the comparison--“why did he call me that?” It was not because he attributed any serious intention to the jester that he argued thus with himself. He was in that mood when everything around us appears mysterious and fraught with some revelation to which we only need a key. The words of the shop-boy became for him a hint from the night itself, like the cryptic utterances of the characters in a play of Maeterlinck’s. “What likeness is there between Christ and me?” he went on, putting the problem before himself more distinctly. What likeness, indeed, between this spoilt child of civilization, to whom the world seemed to have given of its best, for whom Christianity could be no more than a legend, and that buffeted Redeemer hanging on his gibbet in the Syrian sun of two thousand years ago? And yet an insult cannot rankle unless it is barbed with truth. From the inner cells of memory, where they had been stored up in past days by a religious mother, certain words and phrases were already coming forth, as though moved by some subtle affinity, to answer that uncomfortable question. _Despised and rejected of men_--they ran something like that. And again: _Stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted_. There were other words which should have followed, surely, but he tried in vain to draw them forth. _Despised and rejected of men._ The flush darkened on the young man’s cheek as he flung back his head with a rebellious and angry glance at the river’s northern bank, where the shining walls and towers of the city of Ormuzd seemed to overhang the gulf--the glance which an exile gives at the city which has driven him forth. He had fled to the spot, stunned by one of those buffets which life is ever waiting to deal to those who have not learnt their lesson aright. And his ears still smarted with the scream of the newsboys who were proclaiming in every street that Lord Alistair Stuart had failed.