und of our rising. I explained to her
that Mr. Soames had been called away, and that both he and I would be
dining here. It was not until I was out in the open air that I began
to feel giddy. I have but the haziest recollection of what I did,
where I wandered, in the glaring sunshine of that endless afternoon. I
remember the sound of carpenters' hammers all along Piccadilly and the
bare chaotic look of the half-erected "stands." Was it in the Green
Park or in Kensington Gardens or WHERE was it that I sat on a chair
beneath a tree, trying to read an evening paper? There was a phrase in
the leading article that went on repeating itself in my fagged mind:
"Little is hidden from this August Lady full of the garnered wisdom of
sixty years of Sovereignty." I remember wildly conceiving a letter (to
reach Windsor by an express messenger told to await answer): "Madam:
Well knowing that your Majesty is full of the garnered wisdom of sixty
years of Sovereignty, I venture to ask your advice in the following
delicate matter. Mr. Enoch Soames, whose poems you may or may not
know--" Was there NO way of helping him, saving him? A bargain was a
bargain, and I was the last man to aid or abet any one in wriggling out
of a reasonable obligation. I wouldn't have lifted a little finger to
save Faust. But poor Soames! Doomed to pay without respite an eternal
price for nothing but a fruitless search and a bitter disillusioning.

Odd and uncanny it seemed to me that he, Soames, in the flesh, in the
waterproof cape, was at this moment living in the last decade of the
next century, poring over books not yet written, and seeing and seen by
men not yet born. Uncannier and odder still that to-night and evermore
he would be in hell. Assuredly, truth was stranger than fiction.

Endless that afternoon was. Almost I wished I had gone with Soames,
not, indeed, to stay in the reading-room, but to sally forth for a
brisk sight-seeing walk around a new London. I wandered restlessly out
of the park I had sat in. Vainly I tried to imagine myself an ardent
tourist from the eighteenth century. Intolerable was the strain of the
slow-passing and empty minutes. Long before seven o'clock I was back
at the Vingtieme.

I sat there just where I had sat for luncheon. Air came in listlessly
through the open door behind me. Now and again Rose or Berthe appeared
for a moment. I had told them I would not order any dinner till Mr.
Soames came. A hurd