One poor lamp burned in the street. He started to walk slowly and
uncertainly towards it. Near by he saw a hat on the ground. It was his
own. He put it on. Suddenly the street lamp went out. He walked on,
and stepped ankle-deep into broken glass. Then the road was clear
again. He halted. Not a sign of Christine! He decided that she must
have run away, and that she would run blindly and, finding herself
either in Leicester Square or Lower Regent Street, would by instinct
run home. At any rate, she could not be blown to atoms, for they were
together at the instant of the explosion. She must exist, and she must
have had the power of motion. He remembered that he had had a stick;
he had it no longer. He turned back and, taking from his pocket the
electric torch which had lately come into fashion, he examined the
road for his stick. The sole object of interest which the torch
revealed was a child's severed arm, with a fragment of brown frock on
it and a tinsel ring on one of the fingers of the dirty little hand.
The blood from the other end had stained the ground. G.J. abruptly
switched off the torch. Nausea overcame him, and then a feeling of
the most intense pity and anger overcame the nausea. (A month elapsed
before he could mention his discovery of the child's arm to anyone at
all.
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