His heart throbbed with pity for these maimed men, some of them boys fresh from school; then with pride in their English courage and gaiety. He looked round the room curiously and, in his fancy, identified several Pillivants. They generally sat two or three at a table and drank champagne and leaned over, heads together, as they talked. But the impression they made was effaced by that of youth: youth pervaded the place; youth whole and gloriously insolent; youth maimed and defiant; youth predominating, too, among the women, with its eyes alight and cheeks aglow; youth nerved to war, taking it as the daily round, the common task. It was some new planet in which Baltazar found himself, peopled with beings of dimly conjectured interests and habits of thought. After dinner, the loneliest soul in London, he took his hat and thought to go for a stroll. He emerged from the brightly lit vestibule into Tartarean darkness and forbidding silence. Instead of the once glad stream of life, a few vague forms flitted by on the pavement. Now and then a moving light and a whir denoted the passing of a taxi-cab on the roadway. At first he stood outside the hotel door, baffled, until he remembered that he had heard of the darkened thoroughfares. The sky being overclouded, London was denied that night the kindly help of stars. Baltazar saw it in all its blackness, and shrank involuntarily as from the supernatural. He laughed and started. Soon, when his sight grew accustomed to the blackness, his senses were arrested and fascinated by the wonder of this veiled heart of the Empire, by its infinite tones of gloom, by its looming masses of building melting upwards into black nothingness, by the vista of narrow streets, where at the end a dim lamp gave them a note of sinister mystery. But his walk did not last long. As he was crossing a street, an unseen and unheard taxi-cab just swerved in time to miss him by a hair’s-breadth. He felt the wind of it on the back of his neck and caught the curse of the driver. After that he lost his nerve. The re-crossing of Trafalgar Square became a perilous and breathless adventure. He was glad to find himself again in the light and the safe normality of the hotel. No. London was not for him. He found himself even more a stranger than during his last disastrous sojourn. There seemed to be no chance for him to be anything else than a stray number in an hotel. He felt like a bit of waste cog-wheel seeking a place in a perfect machine. “A few days more of this and I’ll go mad,” said he. * * * * *