But when he felt the probing eye of Davidina, and heard the challenge of her voice, ‘Take that off!’--then all his sense of spiritual nakedness returned; and the power over his soul which she had been used to exercise reinstated itself in all its potency. In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, and in the presence of all that people whose mood towards him was on the very point of ceasing to be dangerous, and whose hearts in another minute he would have won to the fulfilling of vengeance due--in a space of time too brief for breath to be taken, she had spiritually scalped him. With his head shorn of glory he stood and looked at her; and fleeing suddenly to the domestic note as his last chance of refuge from the storm which was about to burst, ‘How do you do, Davidina?’ he said. It was magnificent, but it was no good. The crowd’s yell of derision told him that it had failed. Suddenly the taxi disappeared from view; ten, twenty, thirty human atoms, excited, gesticulating, were up and were over it. He saw Davidina fighting her way out of the collapsed framework; saw her in imminent danger, saw her emerge safe and unharmed. With no use or duty to stay him, conscious that all was lost, he turned to flee. It was too late. Active members of the crowd pushed from below swarmed up the colonnades; faster than the eye could count, heads appeared on a level with his waist,--hands, feet, fiery eyes, fierce mouths showing teeth; he became one of a confused group, felt his legs carrying much more than his own weight, his buttons bursting to a rending strain--from behind. Collared, surrounded, forced to the balcony’s edge, he looked down into a sea of eyes; and heard dimly, in the background of his dream, Davidina knocking for admission at the door under his feet; a door which nobody would answer. ‘Up, up!’ came the cry of the crowd. He was hoisted, stood giddily on the stone ledge; swayed, tottered, but hands still held him. Everything then seemed very near and immediate and objective: individual faces, blemishes, blackened eyes, the very cut and colour of men’s clothes, a broken watch-chain, the taxi-driver trying to recover possession of a cab that had become a wreck. Fifty yards away an arc-lamp high aloft on a street refuge for some unexplainable reason spat itself into light. That attracted him, only to remind him with a pang of despair that he could no longer do the same. Light and hope and faith had all gone out of him. ‘Down! Down!’ the crowd’s cry had changed: but its intention was the same. A thousand hands reached up, opening and shutting like mouths, hungry to have hold of him. The hands from behind gave a jerk, then tossed and let go. He felt himself falling, but of that was not afraid. A real fall was impossible; of that the thousand hands made him feel safe. They caught him, forced him down, and set him upon his feet. A voice at his back cried: ‘Stand clear! Give him a run!’