Page:The Yellow Book - 13.djvu/182

164 "I have eaten ashes as it were bread," he murmured (as if to fulfil the magic), "and have mingled my drink with weeping."

He placed the draught upon the table, and kneeling at the low window-sill, looked out upon the road.

The clamour thence had grown louder as the hour drew near to midnight; the choruses more boisterous and less abject to the conventions of time and tune. Above the din of perpetual harsh chatter, on this side and that, rose shrill voices into the extreme register of denunciation and vituperative challenge, buoyed higher to each response by antiphonal remonstrance in a lower octave. A mingled line of young men and women, in various stages of incipient intoxication, wavered past, and beneath the window of No. 79, attained the honeyed climax of their song:

The solitary lodger closed and bolted the window, and pulled the blind well down.

Upon Freddy's mind the last view of the unhappy young man had left an impression which he would gladly have shaken off. It would be too much, indeed, to assert that the memory chased sleep from his pillow, but it was a fact—and he noted it with surprise—that even eight hours of dreamless slumber proved impotent to efface it. By noon, though still resolved that friendship should exact no irrational concession from common sense, he began to be aware that his purpose was less strenuously set than at breakfast-time he had supposed it to be. The attempt to stiffen it ruined his lunch; the last effort to hold out diminished the value of his smoke; and by three o clock he owned himself vanquished. He presently despatched a telegram to his

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