abolic legend with which under the
suggestion of Brother Aloysius he had endowed it. Certainly of all the
streets he had passed this afternoon there had been none less
inferential of romance than this long shopping street.

"What number do you want, sir?" the driver repeated.

"Well, really I want rooms," Michael explained. "Only this seems a bit
noisy."

"Yes, it is a bit boisterous," the cabman agreed.

Michael told him to drive back along the Camden Road; but when he began
to examine the Camden Road as a prospective place of residence, it
became suddenly very dull and respectable. The locked-up chapels and the
quiet houses declined from ominousness into respectability, and he
wondered how he had managed only a quarter of an hour ago to speculate
upon the inner life they adumbrated. Nothing could be less surreptitious
than those chatting nursemaids, and actually in one of the
parallelograms of garden a child was throwing a scarlet ball high into
the air. The cab was already nearing the iron railway bridge of Kentish
Town, and Michael had certainly no wish to lodge in a noisy slum.

"Try turning off to the left," he called to the driver through the roof.

The maneuver seemed likely to be successful, for they entered almost
immediately a district of Victorian terraces, where the name of each
street was cut in stone upon the first house; and so fine and
well-proportioned was each superscription that the houses' declension
from gentility was the more evident and melancholy.

Michael was at last attracted to a crescent of villas terminating an
unfrequented gray street and, for the sake of a pathetic privacy,
guarded in front by a sickle-shaped inclosure of grimy Portugal laurels.
Neptune Crescent, partly on account of its name and partly on account of
the peculiar vitreous tint which the stone had acquired with age,
carried a marine suggestion. The date _1805_ in spidery numerals and the
iron verandas, which even on this June day were a mockery, helped the
illusion that here was a forgotten by-way in an old sea-port. A card
advertising Apartments stood in the window of Number Fourteen. Michael
signaled the driver to stop: then he alighted and rang the bell. The
Crescent was strangely silent. Very far away he could hear the whistle
of a train. Close at hand there was nothing but the jingle of the
horse's harness and the rusty mewing of a yellow cat which was wheedling
its lean body in and out of the railings of the f