He rose to go. Mrs. Templeton turned to him.
"A quarter to three," she said sweetly. "You will remember that?"
Roger looked hard at Mrs. Templeton. Never again would he speak civilly to a woman with high cheek-bones, steel eyes, and loose mouth. He bowed to her.
"I didn't deserve it," he said quietly. He walked to the window-door, feeling like some discovered lover in a play. As he entered the balcony, Templeton slammed to the door behind him with a snarl of "Now," as he opened fire on his wife. Templeton's flanks were turned. He was blowing up his ammunition wagons before surrendering.
For a moment Roger felt furious with Templeton. Then he blamed the lady. She had played him a scurvy trick. Lastly, as he began to understand her position, he forgave her. He blamed himself. He felt that he had mixed himself with something indescribably squalid.
As he undressed for bed he blamed the world for its vulgarity, and dreariness, and savagery. The world was too much with him. It was thwarting, and blighting, and destroying him. He longed to get away from the world. Anywhere. To those Irish hills above the sea, to his beautiful friend, to some peaceful, gentle life, where the squalor of his night's adventures would be unknown and unremembered. He felt contaminated. He longed to purify himself in the sea below his love's home. He thought of that water. He saw it lit by the sun, with tremulous brown sea-leaves folding. Sand at the bottom, six feet down, made a wrinkled blur of paleness, across which a lobster crawled. He would go there. In fifteen hours he would be tearing towards it through the night, past the great glaring towns, on into the hills, to the sea.
A thought of the shaking of the train, and of the uneasy sleep of the people in the carriage, merged gradually into the blur which precedes unconsciousness. Before Big Ben tolled four he was asleep, in that kind of restless nightmare which chains the will without chaining the intelligence. In that kind of sleep which is not sleep he dreamed a dream of Ottalie, which awakened him, in sudden terror, at seven.
III
I prythee, sorrow, leave a little room
In my confounded and tormented mind
For understanding to deliberate
The cause or author of this accident.
The Atheist's Tragedy.