would write to North Ride and keep her informed as to his
movements.

"Good-by, my sweetheart. God bless you."

"Good luck, Will. Good luck, my dear one."

III

The devil's dance had begun.

They kept him waiting. Days passed; but his hour of crisis postponed
itself, and all things combined to enervate him. Above all, the
callous immensity of London oppressed his mind. His case, that had
been so important down there in the village, was absolutely of no
account up here in the city. Not a single sympathizer among these
millions of hurrying human beings.

The General Post Office was itself a town within a town--a mighty
labyrinth that made the imagination ache. To find one's way through a
fractional block of it, to see a thronged corner of any of its yards,
to hear even at a distance the stone thunder made by the smallest
stampede of its red carts, irresistibly evoked a realization of one's
nothingness. Never would he have believed it possible that the local
should thus shrink in presence of the central.

He had taken a bedroom on the top floor of a cheap lodging-house near
the Euston Road, and every night as he climbed the dimly-lit staircase
he knew that he was toiling upward toward a fit of depression. The
house was almost empty of lodgers; no one noticed when he went out or
came in; at each flight of the stairs his sense of solitude increased.

He had never before lived in a building that contained so many
stories, and at first he was troubled by the great height above the
ground; but now he could stand at his open window and look down
without giddiness. Wonder used to fill his mind as he stared out
toward the southeast at the stupendous field of roofs, chimneys, and
towers; at the sparkling powder of street-lamps; at the astounding
yellow haze that extended across the horizon, illuminating the sky
nearly to the zenith, and seemingly like the onset of a terrific
conflagration which only he of all the thousands who were threatened
had as yet observed. Even this bit of London, the comparatively small
part of the overwhelming whole now visible to his eyes, must be as big
as Manninglea Chase. And beyond his half circle of vision, behind him,
on either hand, the forest of houses stretched away almost to
infinity. The thought of it was as crushing as that of interstellar
distances, of the pathless void into which God threw a handful of dust
and then quietly ordained that each speck should be a sun and the