On this occasion, however, for some unaccountable reason, the sight of this forlorn branch brought vividly to his mind the figure of Christie Malakite, as he had seen her that day, crouched in the castle-lane. And with that image there came to him⁠—as if a door had unexpectedly opened in the remotest wall of his mind’s fortress⁠—a deep, sickening craving, it was hard to tell for what⁠—a craving that pierced him like the actual thrust of a spear. The bareness and tension of that extended branch had won his sympathy before; but today, as he rubbed the porridge-pot furiously with the greasy towel and emptied the hot kettle-water into it, the sight of the thing seemed to disturb the complacency of his whole being.

A minute or two later, when he saw it again from the window of their small privy, which abutted upon the same backyard, he got a sense of being hemmed in, burdened, besieged, while some vague, indistinct appeal, hard to define, was calling upon him for aid.