s friends would have no euphemisms
for Lily. How Lonsdale had laughed at the idea of marrying Queenie
Molyneux, and she might have been called an actress. How everybody would
despise his folly. There would not be one friend who would understand.
Least of all would his mother understand. It was a hard thing to do; and
yet it would be comparatively easy, if he could be granted the grace of
faith to sustain him. Principles were rather barren things to support
the soul in a fight with convention. Principles of honor when so very
personal were apt to crumple in the blast of society's principles all
fiercely kindled against him. Just now he had thought of the
thankfulness he owed to God. Was it more than a figure of speech, an
exaggerative personification under great emotion of what most people
would call chance? At any rate, here was God in a cynical mood, and the
divine justice of this retributive situation seemed to hint at something
beyond mere luck. And if principles were strong enough to sustain him to
the onset, faith might fire him to the coronation of his
self-effacement. He made up his mind clearly and calmly to marry Lily,
and then he quickly fell into sleep, where as if to hearten him he saw
her slim and lovely, herself again, treading for his dreams the ways of
night like a gazelle.

Next morning when Michael woke, his resolve purified by sleep of
feverish and hysterical promptings was fresh upon his pillow. In the
fatigue and strain of the preceding night the adventure had caught a
hectic glow of exaltation. Now, with the sparrows twittering and the
milkman clanking and yodeling down Cheyne Walk and the young air puffing
the curtains, his course acquired a simplicity in this lucid hour of
deliberation, which made the future normal and even obvious. There was a
great relief in this fresh following breeze after the becalmed inaction
of Oxford: it seemed an augury of life's importance that so immediately
on top of the Oxford dream he should find such a complete dispersion of
mist and so urgent a fairway before him. The task of finding Lily might
easily occupy him for some time, for a life like hers would be made up
of mutable appearances and sudden strange eclipses. It might well be a
year before she was seen again on the Orient Promenade. Yet it was just
as likely that he would find her at once. For a moment he caught his
breath in thinking of the sudden plunge which that meeting would
involve. He thought of all t