I stood there, looking after him as he went. Then I crossed to the northwest corner of that iron-fenced enclosure and waited for that youth whom the arm of wakefulness was swinging about like a stone in a sling.
I deliberately blocked his way as he tried to edge irritably about me.
"Pardon me," I began. He looked up, like a somnambulist suddenly awakened. "Pardon me, but I think I ought to warn you that you are being followed."
"Am I?"
"Yes; and I think you ought to know it."
"Oh, I know it," was his apathetic response. "I'm even beginning to get used to it."
He stepped back and leaned against the iron fence. His face, under the street-lamps, was a very unhappy looking one. It carried a woebegone impassivity, the impassivity which implied he was so submerged in misery that no further blow could be of consequence to him. And yet, beyond the fixed pallor of that face there was something appealing, some trace of finer things, some touch which told me that he and the nocturnal underworld had nothing in common.
"But are you getting used to the other thing?" I asked.
"What other thing?" was his slow inquiry. I could see the twin fires of some dull fever burning in the depths of his cavernous eyes.
"Going without sleep," I answered. For the second time he stared at me.