ere bobbing to one another in nearly all the compartments.
Michael sighed.

"Don't go," said Guy. "It's much too hot."

Michael shook his head.

"I must."

Just then a porter came up to tell Guy there were three packing-cases
awaiting his disposal in the luggage-office.

"Some of my books," he shouted, as the train was puffing out. Michael
watched from the window Guy and the porter, the only figures among the
wine-dark dahlias of the platform.

"What fun unpacking them," he thought, and leaned back regretfully to
survey the placid country gliding past.

Yet even after that secluded and sublunary town where Guy in retrospect
seemed to be moving as remotely as a knight in an old tale, London, or
rather the London which shows itself in the neighborhood of great
railway termini, impressed Michael with nearly as sharp a romantic
strangeness, so dreadfully immemorial appeared the pale children,
leaning over scabrous walls to salute the passing train. Always, as one
entered London, one beheld these children haunting the backs of houses
whose frontal existence as a mapped-out street was scarcely credible. To
Michael they were goblins that lived only in this gulley of fetid
sunlight through which the trains endlessly clanged. Riding through
London in a hansom a few minutes later, the people of the city became
unreal to him, and only those goblin-children remained in his mind as
the natural inhabitants. He drove on through the quiet streets and
emerged in that space of celestial silver which was called Chelsea; but
the savage roar of the train, as it had swept through those gibbering
legions of children, was still in Michael's ears when the hansom pulled
up before the sedate house in Cheyne Walk.

The parlormaid showed no surprise at his unexpected arrival, and
informed him casually with no more indication of human interest than
would have been given by a clock striking its mechanical message of
time that Miss Stella was in the studio. That he should have been
unaware of his sister's arrival seemed suddenly to Michael a too
intimate revelation of his personality to the parlormaid, and he
actually found himself taking the trouble to deceive this machine by an
affectation of prior knowledge. He was indeed caught up and imprisoned
by the coils of infinitely small complications that are created by the
social stirrings of city life. The pale children seen from the train
sank below the level of ordinary existence, no longer c