at him with mischievous eyes. "Good-bye," she repeated,
lightly, and then, between her teeth, she added, "Imbecile that you
are!"

Though what she may have meant by that, Tristrem never understood.

XIII.

It was under cover of a fog of leprous brown striated with ochre and
acrid with smoke that Tristrem entered London. In allusion to that most
delightful of cities, someone has said somewhere that hell must be just
such another place. If the epigrammatist be right, then indeed is it
time that the rehabilitation of the lower regions began. London is
subtle and cruel, perhaps, and to the meditative traveller it not
infrequently appears like an invocation to suicide writ in stone. But
whoso has once accustomed himself to its breath may live ever after in
flowerful Arcadias and yet dream of its exhalations with regret. In
Venice one may coquette with phantoms; Rome has ghosts and memories of
her own; in Paris there is a sparkle that is headier than absinthe;
Berlin resounds so well to the beat of drums that even the pusillanimous
are brave; but London is the great enchantress. It is London alone that
holds the secret of inspiring love and hatred as well.

Tristrem sniffed the fog with a sensation of that morbid pleasure which
girls in their teens and women in travail experience when they crave and
obtain repulsive food. Had he not hungered for it himself? and did she
not breathe it too?

The journey from Euston Square to the hotel in Jermyn Street at which he
proposed to put up, was to him a confusion of impatience and
anticipation. He was sure of finding a cablegram from Mrs. Raritan's
attorney, and was it not possible that he might see Viola that very
night? In Jermyn Street, however, no message awaited him. Under the
diligent supervision of a waiter who had the look and presence of a
bishop he managed later to eat some dinner. But the evening was a blank:
he passed it twirling his thumbs, dumbly irritated, incapable of action,
and perplexed as he had never been before.

The next morning his Odyssey began. He cabled to Mr. Meggs, and saw the
clerk put beneath the message the cabalistic letters _A. P._ And then,
in an attempt to frighten Time, he had his measure taken in Saville Row
and his hair cut in Bond Street. But in vain--the day dragged as though
its wheels were clogged. By noon he had exhausted every possible
resource. Another, perhaps, might have beguiled the tedium with drink,
or cultivated what B