ristics of its eternal motion.
They too, he felt, irresponsive as fish, would glide backward and
forward with the rest. Nor did Michael meet anyone whom he knew at any
of the restaurants or cafes to which he went after the theater. By the
intensity of his one idea, the discovery of Lily, he cut himself off
from all communion with the life of the places he visited. He often
thought that perhaps acquaintances saw him there, that perhaps he had
seemed deliberately to avoid their greetings and for that reason had
never been hailed. Yet he was aware of seeing women whom he had seen the
night before, mostly because they bore a superficial likeness to Lily;
and sometimes he would be definitely conscious of a dress or a hat,
perceiving it in the same place at the same hour, but never meeting the
wearer's glance.

He did not make any attempt to be friendly with Poppy after their
unpleasant encounter, and he always tried to be sure they would not meet
in the hall or outside the front door. That he was successful in
avoiding her gave him a still sharper sense of the ease with which it
was possible to seclude one's self from the claims of human intercourse.
He was happy in his room at Neptune Crescent, gazing out over the
sickle-shaped garden of Portugal laurels, listening in a dream to the
distant cries of railway traffic and reading the books which every
afternoon he brought back from Charing Cross Road, so many books indeed
that presently the room in 14 Neptune Crescent came curiously to
resemble rooms in remote digs at Oxford, where poor scholars imposed
their books on surroundings they could not afford to embellish. Mrs.
Murdoch could not make Michael out at all. She used to stand and watch
him reading, as if he were performing an intricate surgical operation.

"I never in all my life saw anyone read like you do," she affirmed.
"Doesn't it tire your eyes?"

Then she would move a step nearer and spell out the title of the book,
looking sideways at it like a fat goose.

"Holy Living and Holy Dying. Ugh! Enough to give you the horrors, isn't
it? And only this morning they hung that fellow at Pentonville. This
_is_ Tuesday, isn't it?"

After three or four days of trying to understand him, Mrs. Murdoch
decided that Alf must be called in to solve his peculiarity.

Mr. Alfred Murdoch was younger than Michael had expected. He could
scarcely have been more than forty, and Michael had formed a
preconception of an elderly chemist