But one solitary night intoxication for the first time overcame him. He realized it with a feeling of anger. The lights were just being lowered. He ordered a double liqueur brandy, in the crazy assurance that it would pull him together. Of what happened afterwards he had little memory. In the crowded street someone laid hold of him and, resentful of attack, he turned and smote his supporter. To complete the outrage, a policeman handled him roughly, a proceeding which he also violently resented. Then a whirl of lights and darkness and lights again, and strange faces and once more darkness absolute and final, until he awoke and found himself sober and shivering in a police cell. A few hours afterwards, James Burden, of no occupation, living at the Savoy Hotel, was fined forty shillings or a month for being drunk and disorderly in Leicester Square. If it had been a magnificent folly, a royal debauch, a voluptuous orgy of roses and wine and laughter and song and the pulsating lustiness of life, the _dulce periculum_ of the follower of the Lenæan one brow-bound with green vine-leaves, he might have held himself in some measure excused. He had made no vow, he had no reason, to spurn the joyousness of existence. He was a man of racing blood, with claim and right to the gladness of physical things. But this sordid, solitary bout with its end of vulgarity and degradation, filled him with a horror almost maddening in its fierceness. His soul shrivelled at the ghastly humiliation. That it should come upon him; him, John Baltazar, with half a century of clean life behind him; him, John Baltazar, the man who had compelled high honour for intellect and character from his childhood days, at a Public School, at the University, as an unknown and prejudice-surrounded foreigner in the strangest of alien lands; that it should come upon him seemed like a phantasma or a hideous dream. And then it fell that he once more cut the Gordian knot. He would fly from a world in which he had proved himself not fit to live cleanly, with all the less reluctance because he had found it incomprehensible and unattractive. And sitting dishevelled on the bed, he informed Quong Ho of his decision. As soon as he had cleansed himself from the soil of the awful night, he left the Savoy and the dishonoured name of James Burden for ever, and took rooms at another hotel for the night as John Baltazar. The next day he threw himself vehemently into the quest of a hermitage. He remembered a desolate waste of moorland through which on a walking tour he had rambled in his undergraduate days. “It may be, Quong Ho,” said he, “that it is built over with picture palaces and swarming with tango-dancers. Any conceivable happening to England during the last twenty years is possible. But we’ll go and see.”