ber of
insignificant little families whose almost humiliating submission to the
tyranny of city life was expressed pathetically by the humble flaunting
of their window-boxes and in their front gardens symbolically by the
dingy parterres of London Pride. Michael wondered whether a spirit
haunting the earth feels in the perception of its former territory so
much shame as he felt now in approaching 64 Carlington Road. When he
reached the house itself, he was able to expel his sentiment for the
past by the trivial fact that the curtains of the new owner had
dispossessed the house of its personality. Only above the door, the
number in all its squat assurance was able to convince him that this was
indeed the house where he had wrestled so long and so hardly with the
problems of childhood. There, too, was the plane-tree that, once an
object of reproach, now certainly gave some distinction to the threshold
of this house when every area down the road owned a lime-tree identical
in age and growth.

Yet with all his distaste for 64 Carlington Road Michael could scarcely
check the impulse he had to mount the steps and, knocking at the door,
inform whomsoever should open it that he had once lived in this very
house. He passed on, however, remembering at every corner of every new
street some bygone unimportant event which had once occupied his whole
horizon. Involuntarily he walked on and on in a confusion of
recollections, until he came to the corner of the road where Lily Haden
lived.

It was with a start of self-rebuke that he confessed to himself that
here was the ultimate object of his revisitation. He had scarcely
thought of Lily since the betrayal of his illusions on that brazen July
day when last he had seen her in the garden behind her house. If he had
thought of her at all, she had passed through his mind like the memory,
or less even than the definite memory, like the consciousness that never
is absent of beautiful days spent splendidly in the past. Sometimes
during long railway journeys Michael had played with himself the game of
vowing to remember an exact moment, some field or effect of clouds which
the train was rapidly passing. Yet though he knew that he had done this
a hundred times, it was always as impossible to conjure again the vision
he had vowed to remember as it had been impossible ever to remember the
exact moment of falling asleep.

After all, however, Lily could not have taken her place with these
momen