e for him lay very
easily discernible the true corollary to the four years of Oxford. They
had been years of rest and refreshment, years of armament with wise and
academic and well-observed theories of behavior that would defeat the
victory of evil. It was very satisfactory to discover definitely that he
was not a Pragmatist. He had suspected all that crew of philosophers. He
would bring back Lily from evil, not from any illusion of evil. He would
not allow himself to disparage the problem before him by any
speciousness of worldly convenience. It was imperative to meet Lily
again as one who moving in the shadows meets another in the nether
gloom. They had met first of all as boy and girl, as equals. Now he must
not come too obviously from the world she had left behind her. Such an
encounter would never give him more than at best a sentimental appeal;
at worst it could have the air of a priggish reclamation, and she would
forever elude him, she with secret years within her experience. His
instinct first to sever himself from his own world must have been
infallible, and it was on account of that instinct that now he found
himself in Neptune Crescent leaning over the window-sill and scenting
the reasty London air.

And how well secluded was this room. If he met Lonsdale or Maurice or
Wedderburn, it would be most fantastically amusing to evade them at the
evening's end, to retreat from their company into Camden Town; into
Neptune Crescent unimaginable to them; into this small room with its red
rep chairs and horsehair sofa and blobbed valances and curtains; to
this small room where the dark blue wall-paper inclosed him with a
matted vegetation and the picture of Belshazzar's Feast glowered above
the heavy sideboard; to this small room made rich by the two thorny
shells upon the mantelpiece, by the bowl of blond goldfish in ceaseless
dim circumnatation, and by those colored pampas plumes and the bulrushes
in their conch of nacreous glass.

Mrs. Murdoch came in with tea which he drank while she stood over him
admiringly.

"Do you think you'll be staying long?" she inquired.

Michael asked if she wanted the rooms for anyone else.

"No. No. I'm really very glad to let them. You'll find it nice and quiet
here. There's only Miss Carlyle, who's in the profession and comes in
sometimes a little late. Mr. Murdoch is a chemist. But of course he
hasn't got his own shop now."

She paused, and seemed to expect Michael would comme