e way, where are you going for your
honeymoon? It sounds absurd to ask such a question at this hour, but
I've never heard."

"We're going to Compiegne," said Stella. "I wrote to little
Castera-Verduzan, and he's lent us the cottage where you and I stayed."

That choice of Stella's seemed to mark more decisively than anything she
had said or done his own second place in her thoughts nowadays.

When the bride and bridegroom were gone, Michael sat with his mother,
talking.

"I had arranged to go to the South of France with Mrs. Carruthers," she
told him. "But if you're going to be here, I could put her off."

Michael felt rather guilty. He had not considered his mother's
loneliness, and he had meant to return at once to Leppard Street.

"No, no, I'm going away again," he told her.

"Just as you like, dearest boy."

"You're glad about Stella?"

"Very glad."

"And you like Alan?"

"Of course. Charming--charming."

The firelight danced in opals on the window-panes, and the macaw who had
been brought up to Mrs. Fane's sitting-room out of the way of the
wedding guests sharpened his beak on the perch.

"It's really quite chilly this afternoon," said Mrs. Fane.

"Yes, there's a good deal of mist along the river," said Michael. "A
pity that the fine weather should have broken up. It may be rather
dreary in the forest."

"Why did they go to a forest?" she asked. "So like Stella to choose a
forest in November. Most unpractical. Still, when one is young and in
love, one doesn't notice the mud."

Next day Mrs. Fane went off to the South of France, and Michael went
back to Leppard Street.

CHAPTER V

THE INNERMOST CIRCLE

November fogs began soon after Michael returned to Leppard Street, and
these fuliginous days could cast their own peculiar spell. To enter the
house at dusk was to stand for a moment choking in blackness; and even
when the gas flared and whistled through a sickly nebula, it only made
more vast the lightless vapors above, so that the interior seemed at
first not a place of shelter, but a mirage of the streets that would
presently dissolve in the drifting fog. These nights made Pimlico
magical for walking. Distance was obliterated; time was abolished; life
was disembodied. He never tired of wandering up and down the Vauxhall
Bridge Road where the trams came trafficking like strange ships, so
unfamiliar did they seem here beside the dumpy horse omnibuses.

One evening when the fog was n