en shock of conviction that Michael realized he was in
Neptune Crescent, Camden Town, and that yesterday he had actually been
in Oxford. And why was he here? The impulse which had brought him must
have lain deeper in the recesses of his character than those quixotic
resolutions roused by Drake's legend of Lily. He would not otherwise
have determined at once upon so complete a demigration. He would have
waited to test the truth of Drake's story. His first emotional despair
had vanished with almost unaccountable ease. Certainly he wanted to be
independent of the criticism of his friends until he had proved his
purpose unwavering, and he might ascribe this withdrawal to a desire for
a secluded and unflinching contemplation of a life that from Cheyne Walk
he could never focus. But ultimately he must acknowledge that his
sojourn here, following as it did straight upon his entrance into the
underworld through the disappointing portals of the Seven Sisters Road,
was due to that ancient lure of the shades. This experience was
foredoomed from very infancy. It was designated in childish dreams to
this day indelible. He could not remember any period in his life when
the speculum of hidden thought had not reflected for his fear that
shadow of evil which could overcast the manifestations of most ordinary
existence. Those days of London fog when he had sat desolately in the
pinched red house in Carlington Road; those days when on his lonely
walks he had passed askance by Padua Terrace; the shouting of murders by
newspaper-boys on drizzled December nights; all those dreadful
intimations in childhood had procured his present idea of London. With
the indestructible truth of earliest impressions they still persisted
behind the outward presentation of a normal and comfortable procedure in
the midst of money, friends, and well-bred conventions. Nor had that
speculum been merely the half-savage fancy of childhood, the endowment
by the young of material things with immaterial potencies. Phantoms
which had slunk by as terrors invisible to the blind eyes of grown-ups
had been abominably incarnate for him. Brother Aloysius had been
something more than a mere personification, and that life which the
ex-monk had indicated as scarcely even below the surface, so easy was it
to enter, had he not entered it that one night very easily?

Destiny, thought Michael, had stood with pointed finger beside the
phantoms and the realities of the underworld. Ther