They so obviously needed to
be told what they might do, and which way they should, go; they would
accept orders as they accepted their work, or pleasures: And the thought
that he was now debarred from the right to give them orders, rankled in
him furiously. They, in their turn, glanced casually at his tall figure
leaning against the parapet, not knowing how their fate was trembling in
the balance. His thin, sallow face, and hungry eyes gave one or two of
them perhaps a feeling of interest or discomfort; but to most he was
assuredly no more than any other man or woman in the hurly-burly. That
dark figure of conscious power struggling in the fetters of its own
belief in power, was a piece of sculpture they had neither time nor wish
to understand, having no taste for tragedy--for witnessing the human
spirit driven to the wall.
It was five o'clock before Miltoun left the Bridge, and passed, like an
exile, before the gates of Church and State, on his way to his uncle's
Club. He stopped to telegraph to Audrey the time he would be coming
to-morrow afternoon; and on leaving the Post-Office, noticed in
the window of the adjoining shop some reproductions of old Italian
masterpieces, amongst them one of Botticelli's 'Birth of Venus.' He had
never seen that picture; and, remembering that she had told him it was
her favourite, he stopped to look at it.
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