sparrows," Michael contradicted. He was becoming
absorbed by his notion of Lily in such surroundings. It seemed to remove
the last doubt he had of the wisdom or necessity of the step he proposed
to take. They would be able to re-enter the world after a long
retirement. For her it should be a convalescence, and for him the
opportunity which Oxford denied to test academic values on the
touchstone of human emotions. It was obvious that his education lacked
something, though his academic education was finished. He supposed he
had apprehended dimly the risk of this incompletion in Paris during that
first Long Vacation. It was curious how already the quest of Lily had
assumed less the attributes of a rescue than of a personal desire for
the happiness of her company. No doubt he must be ready for a shock of
disillusion when they did meet, but for the moment Drake's account of
her on the Orient Promenade lost all significance of evil. The news had
merely fired him with the impulse to find her again.

"It is really extraordinarily romantic up here," Maurice exclaimed,
bursting in upon his reverie.

"Yes, I suppose that's the reason," Michael admitted.

"The reason of what?" Maurice asked.

"Of what I was thinking," Michael said.

Maurice waited for him to explain further, but Michael was silent; and
almost immediately Castleton came back with provision for lunch.

Soon after they had eaten Michael said he would leave them to their
hammering. Then he went back to Cheyne Walk and, finding the house still
and empty in the sunlight, he packed a kit-bag, called a hansom-cab, and
told the driver to go to the Seven Sisters Road.

CHAPTER II

NEPTUNE CRESCENT

The existence of the Seven Sisters Road had probably not occurred to
Michael since in the hazel-coppices of Clere Abbey he had first made of
it at Brother Aloysius' behest the archetype of Avernus, and yet his
choice of it now for entrance to the underworld was swift as instinct.
The quest of Lily was already beginning to assume the character of a
deliberate withdrawal from the world in which he familiarly moved. With
the instant of his resolve all that in childhood and in youth he had
apprehended of the dim territory, which in London sometimes lay no
farther away than the other side of the road, demanded the trial of his
experience.

That he had never yet been to the Seven Sisters Road gave it a mystery;
that it was not very far from Kentish Town gave it a gr