The pigs, aroused by his approach, set up a hideous hullabaloo; and the foul smell of their enclosure followed the indrawn panting of his breath. He paused for a minute, with his hands on the fence of the shed, uttering a foolish malediction upon the screeching snouts raised towards him. Then he turned with a groan and shuffled back across the road.

Standing disconsolately by the table, he mechanically lifted up Gerda’s plate and surveyed the cheque beneath it. He recalled how she had folded it up with cold, indifferent fingers. He pressed it with his clenched knuckles and recovered it. Could he do nothing to make her come now, this very moment? “My ‘mythology’!” he thought. Up went his hands to his eyes; and pressing his eyeballs lightly, so as to blot out everything, he concentrated his whole nature in one terrific effort to summon up that formidable magnetic mystery.

His will, thus strained to its uttermost, gave him a sensation as if an obstinate, taut rope were tugging at a waterlogged bucket. Not a stir, not a vibration, in those dark interior gulfs!