did; it need only be
mentioned that before the pair parted Julia said to him, still in
reference to their young friend: "Do go and see her and be nice to her;
she'll save you disappointments."

These last words reverberated for him--there was a shade of the
portentous in them and they seemed to proceed from a larger knowledge of
the subject than he himself as yet possessed. They were not absent from
his memory when, in the beginning of May, availing himself, to save
time, of the night-service, he crossed from Paris to London. He arrived
before the breakfast-hour and went to his sister's house in Great
Stanhope Street, where he always found quarters, were she in town or
not. When at home she welcomed him, and in her absence the relaxed
servants hailed him for the chance he gave them to recover their "form."
In either case his allowance of space was large and his independence
complete. He had obtained permission this year to take in scattered
snatches rather than as a single draught the quantum of holiday to which
he was entitled; and there was, moreover, a question of his being
transferred to another capital--in which event he believed he might
count on a month or two in England before proceeding to his new post.

He waited, after breakfast, but a very few minutes before jumping into a
hansom and rattling away to the north. A part of his waiting indeed
consisted of a fidgety walk up Bond Street, during which he looked at
his watch three or four times while he paused at shop windows for fear
of being a little early. In the cab, as he rolled along, after having
given an address--Balaklava Place, Saint John's Wood--the fear he might
be too early took curiously at moments the form of a fear that he should
be too late: a symbol of the inconsistencies of which his spirit at
present was full. Peter Sherringham was nervously formed, too nervously
for a diplomatist, and haunted with inclinations and indeed with designs
which contradicted each other. He wanted to be out of it and yet dreaded
not to be in it, and on this particular occasion the sense of exclusion
was an ache. At the same time he was not unconscious of the impulse to
stop his cab and make it turn round and drive due south. He saw himself
launched in the breezy fact while morally speaking he was hauled up on
the hot sand of the principle, and he could easily note how little these
two faces of the same idea had in common. However, as the consciousness
of going helped