The performance was over: the curtain had descended and the spectators had dispersed.

There had been a slight crush at the doors of the theatre, and what with the abrupt change from the pleasant warmth and light of the interior to the sharp chill of the night outside, Preston shivered, and a sudden weakness smote him at the joints.

The crowd on the pavement in front of the theatre melted away with unexampled rapidity, in fact, seemed almost to waver and disappear as if the mise en scene had changed in some inexplicable way.

A hansom drove up, and Preston stepped into it heavily, glancing drowsily askance at the driver as he did so.

Seated up there, barely visible in the gloom, the driver had an almost grisly aspect, humped with waterproof capes, and with such a lean, white face. Preston, as he glanced at him, shivered again.

The trap-door above him opened softly, and the colourless face peered down at him curiously.

“Where to, sir?” asked the hollow voice.

Preston leaned back wearily. “Home,” he replied.

It did not strike him as anything strange or unusual, that the driver asked no questions but drove off without a word. He was very weary, and he wanted to rest.

The sleepless hum of the city was abidingly in his ears, and the lamps that dotted the misty pavements stared at him blinkingly all along the route. The tall black buildings rose up grimly into the night; the faces that flitted to and fro along the pavements, kept ever sliding past him, melting into the darkness; and the cabs and ’buses, still astir in the streets, had a ghostly air as they vanished in the gloom.

Preston lay back, weary in every joint, a drowsy numbness settling on his pulse. He had faith in his driver: he would bring him safely home.

Presently they were at one of the wharves beside the river: Preston could hear the gurgle of the water around the piles.

Not this way had he ever before gone homeward. He looked out musingly on the swift, black stream.

“Just in time: we can go down with the tide,” said a voice.

Preston would have uttered some protest, but this sluggishness overpowered him: it was as if he could neither lift hand nor foot. The inertia of indifference had penetrated into his bones.

Presently he was aware that he had entered a barge that lay close against the wharf, heaving on the tide. And, as if it were all a piece of the play, the lean old driver, with his dead-white face, had the oars in his hands and stood quietly facing him, guiding the dark craft down the stream.

The panorama of the river-bank kept changing and shifting in the most inexplicable manner, and Preston was aware of a crowd of pictures ever coming and going before his eyes: as if some subtle magician, standing behind his shoulder, were projecting for him, on the huge black screen of night, the most marvellous display of memories he had ever contemplated. For they were all memories, or blends of memories, that now rose here on the horizon of his consciousness. There was nothing new in essentials presented to him: but the grouping was occasionally novel to a fault.

The dear old home the dear old folks! Green hills, with the little white-washed cottage in a dimple of them, and in the foreground the wind-fretted plain of the sea. The boyish games marbles and hoop-trundling and the coming home at dusk to the red-lighted kitchen, where the mother had the tea ready on the table and the sisters sat at their knitting by the fire.

The dear, dear mother! how his pulse yearned towards her! there were tears in his eyes as he thought of her now. Yet, all the same, the quiet of his pulse was profound.

And there was the familiar scenery of his daily life: the ink-stained desks, the brass rails for the books, the ledgers and bank-books, and the files against the walls; and the faces of his fellow-clerks (even the office boy) depicted here before him to the very life.

The wind across the waters blew chilly in his face: he shivered, a numbness settling in his limbs.

His sweet young wife, so loving and gentle how shamefully he had neglected her, seeking his own pleasure selfishly there she sat in the familiar chair by the fireside with dear little Daisy dancing on her knee. What a quiet, restful interior it was! He wondered: would they miss him much if he were dead? . . . Above all, would little Daisy understand what it meant when some one whispered to her “favee is dead”?

The wavering shadows seemed to thicken around the boat. And the figure at the oars how lean and white it was: and yet it seemed a good kind of fellow, too, he thought. Preston watched it musingly as the stream bore them onward: the rushing of the water almost lulling him to sleep.

Were they sweeping outward, then, to the unknown sea?

It was an unexpected journey. . . . And he had asked to be taken home!

Presently the air grew full of shapes: shadowy shapes with mournful faces; shapes that hinted secrets, with threatenings in their eyes.

If a man’s sins, now, should take to themselves bodies, would it not be in some such guise as this they would front and affright him at dead of night?

Preston shivered, sitting there like a mere numb lump.

How much of his wrong-doing is forgiven to a man and how much remembered against him in the reckoning?

How awful this gruesome isolation was becoming!

Was it thus a man went drifting up to God?

The figure at the oars was crooning softly. It was like the lullaby his mother used to sing to him when he was a child.

There was a breath of freer air humanity lay behind them they were alone with Nature on the vast, dim sea.

The numbness crept to the roots of his being. He had no hands to lift; he had no feet to move. His heart grew sluggish: there was a numbness in his brain.

Death stood upright now in the bow before him: and in the east he was aware of a widening breadth of grey.

Would the blackness freshen into perfect day for him . . . or would the night lie hopelessly on him for ever? . . .

The figure drew near and laid its hand across his eyes. . . .

“Thrown out of the hansom, and the wheels went over him, sir. He was dead in less than five minutes, I should think.”

“Cover his face . . . and break it gently to his wife.”