had forgotten to take out the girls'
shoes, and what company they were through the gloom! It was a most
fascinating experience, to wander along holding these silky slippers
which had twinkled through the evening of this night. Not a cab-horse
blew a frosty breath by the curb; not a policeman loomed; nor passer-by
nor cat offended his isolation. The London night belonged to him; his
only were the footsteps echoing back from the invisible houses on either
side; and the golden room in Tinderbox Lane was never more than a few
yards in front.

He had found Lily at last, and he held her shoes for a token of his good
luck. Let no one tell him again that destiny was a fable. Nothing was
ever more deliberately foredoomed than the meeting at that carnival.
Michael was so grateful to his tobacconist that he determined to buy all
sorts of extravagant pipes and cigarette holders he had fingered vaguely
from time to time in the shop. For a while Lily's discovery was colored
with such a glamour that Michael did not analyze the situation in which
he had found her. Walking back to Chelsea through the fog, he was
bemused by the romantic memory of her which was traveling along with his
thoughts. He could hold very tightly her shoes: he could almost embrace
the phantom of her beauty that curled upon the vapors round each lamp:
he was intoxicated merely by the sound of the street where she lived.

"Tinderbox Lane! Tinderbox Lane! Tinderbox Lane!"

He sang it in triumph, remembering how only this morning he had sighed
to himself, as he chased the telegraph-wires up and down the window of
the railway-carriage: "Where is she? Where is she? Where is she?"

"Tinderbox Lane! Tinderbox Lane! Tinderbox Lane!" he chanted at the fog,
and, throwing a slipper into the air, he caught it and ran on
ridiculously until he bumped into a policeman standing by the corner.

"I'm awfully sorry, constable."

"Feeling a bit happy, sir, aren't you?"

"Frightfully happy. I say, by the by, happy new year, constable. Drink
my health when you're off duty."

He pressed half-a-crown into the policeman's hand, and as he left the
stolid form behind him in the fog, he remembered that half-a-crown was
the weekly blackmail paid by Mrs. Smith of Leppard Street. He was on the
Embankment now, and the fog had lifted so that he saw the black river
flowing sullenly through the night. The plane-trees dripped with
monotonous beads of dankness. The fog was become a mist here