It was there that the thing had begun.

Before that night upon the roof, the finger-posts which he had set up with such care and deliberation along the road which led towards his coveted goal, had seemed to him to point with unfaltering directness towards everything in life worthy of consideration.

To-night they were only dreary phantasms, marking time across a miserable plain.
Perhaps, after all, there had been something in his nature, some rebel thing, intolerable yet to be reckoned with, which had been first born of that fateful curiosity of his.

It had leapt up so suddenly, sprung with such scanty notice into strenuous and insistent life.

Yet what place had it there?
He must fight against it, root it out with both hands.