Trup, trap, trup, trap . . . came the sound of heavy feet coming down the street in front of him. Two policemen on their beat were coming along slowly, rattling door chains as they came. Gypo’s heart began to beat with terror. He thought they were looking for him. In his bewilderment he could not understand that he was now under police protection, an informer. He forgot that he had only to rush up to them and say that the Revolutionary Organization had condemned him to death and were now tracking him, in order to be taken to a police barracks, into safety. On the contrary, he still regarded them as his enemies. His mentality had not yet accustomed itself to the change that his going in the police-station that evening had wrought in his condition. To his understanding he was still a revolutionary. He was not at all conscious of being an informer, or a friend of law and order, a protégé of the police. He bolted headlong out of the laneway and clattered away across the street. He wheeled to the right, ran ten yards and then dived into another lane. He continued his flight without stopping. He ran without purpose, without guidance, driven northwards by panic and the impossibility of thought. He ran headlong in all directions, into a street, down its course, then to the left, back again in a parallel line, down once more the street he had left, passing several times the same corner in his mad flight. He ran desperately, as if he were chasing some elusive sprite that delighted in turning on its own tracks. He floundered through pools. He struggled on his hands and knees over waste plots. He crushed violently through holes in torn walls. He climbed over piles of bricks, over walls, jumped into backyards and then climbed back again into another street. He was scratched, covered with mud, dripping wet. His eyes were bloodshot. Then suddenly a clock struck the half-hour close by him. It was half-past four. He stopped dead, attracted by the tolling of the clock. It was not the sound but the remembrance it brought. He knew that clock. It was near Katie Fox’s house where he used to sleep. He stood in the middle of a narrow lane, with his legs wide apart and his chest and shoulders thrust forward listening to it. His lips were opened wide. He stood, like an uncouth, half-formed thing, alone in the half-grey shadows of the night, wondering at strange things. “It’s two turns from here,” he murmured, “first to the left, then to the right. She should be in be now. That must be three or four o’clock.”