Slowly, as he waited, did the earth swing into greyness, into dusk, into darkness. Cramped and chilly, he felt as if it needed more energy than he possessed to clamber down again into the road! A sort of waking-trance fell upon him as he crouched there, growing more and more cold and numb; and it was almost quite dark when he resumed his walk.

“I am like a ghost that’s been damned,” he thought, as he moved on. And indeed it was just as such a ghost would have felt that he had the sense of being cut off from all the magnetic reservoirs of the planet! He experienced a physical sensation of lightness, of hollowness, as he walked⁠—as if he had been a husk, blown by the faintest of all winds!

When he reached the path that crossed the fields to the main highway, “I suppose,” he thought, “the whole business has been inevitable since the beginning; the sort of thing that had to happen, if a nature like mine lost its pride?”