" said
Michael. "At the worst, it can only unbalance your judgment. I passed
through it at the age of sixteen."

"You must have been horribly precocious," said Nigel disapprovingly.

"Oh, not more so than anyone who has freedom to develop. I should give
up subjective encounters with evil, if I were you. You'll be telling me
soon that you've been pinched by demons like an Egyptian eremite."

Nigel gave the impression of rather deploring the lack of such an
experience, and Michael laughed:

"Go and see Maurice Avery in Grosvenor Road. He's just the person you
ought to convert. Nothing could be easier than to turn Mossy into an
aesthetic Christian. Would that satisfy your zeal?"

"I really think you _are_ growing very offensive," said Nigel.

"No, I'm not. I'm illustrating a point. Your encounters with evil and
Maurice's encounters with religion would match each other. Both would
have a very wide, but also a very superficial area."

November had arrived, and Michael reappeared in Cheyne Walk to assist at
Stella's wedding. He paid no attention to the scorn she flung at his
affected mode of life, and he successfully resisted her most carefully
planned sallies of curiosity:

"What you have to do at present is to keep your own head, not mine.
Think of the responsibilities of marriage and let me alone. I'll tell
you quite enough when the moment comes for telling."

"Michael, you're getting dreadfully obstinate," Stella declared. "I
remember when I could get a secret out of you in no time."

"It's not I who am obstinate," said Michael. "It's you who are utterly
spoiled by the lovelorn Alan."

Michael and Alan went for a long walk in Richmond Park on the day before
the wedding. It was a limpid day at the shutting-in of St. Martin's
summer, and to Michael it seemed like the ghost of one of those June
Saturdays of eight years ago. Time had faded that warmer blue to a
wintry turquoise, but there was enough of summer's image in this wraith
of a day to render very poignantly to him the past. He wondered if Alan
were thinking of the afternoons when they had sent the sun down from
Richmond Hill. That evening before the examinations of a summer term
recurred to him now more insistently than any of those dead days.

Thick as autumnal leaves that strew the brooks
In Vallombrosa.

Now the leaves were lying brown and dewy in the Richmond thickets. Then
it was a summer evening of foliage in the prime. He wished he could