There was only one man on this day who did not quicken his steps to cross that floor. It was an elderly knight who had arrived at the north end of the place in a black sedan chair, and bid his porters let him off there. He alit near the pillory, where a fat man was being whipped, writhing and hopping as each new stripe decorated his back, but refusing to cry out. The old man from the sedan chair swung wide of the post so he wouldn’t be flecked by hurtling blood, and stepped into a gap between a pair of coffee-houses that had been troweled onto the ancient façade of the hall, nearly hiding its main entrance. He needed no wig, for his hair, though thin, still grew long and straight, and smallpox had left little mark on him. And he needed no powder, for his hair had been white as salt for half a century. He strolled the length of the Hall slowly, raising his protruberant eyes to meet the gaze of certain of those omniscient angels, paying others no mind. He glanced about from time to time, as if his ears could detect echoes and discern resonances to which all others were deaf. In time he reached the south end of the vault where traffic was funneled between the two makeshift law-courts. With a visible hardening of his face he forced himself into a dissolving noise beyond. He was gone from the Hall. Perhaps he had changed it in his passage, added some faint strain that echoed after he was gone, and echoes there still.