ort attacked him. It
began with the slightly bitter thought of being "out of it." He looked
disapprovingly at pallid and puffed young swells gliding past in cabs;
at the humbler folk who hurried by without seeming to be aware of his
existence, who bumped into him and never said "Pardon!"; at the
painted women of the narrower pavements--more foreigners half of
them--who leered and murmured.

"Where's the police?" He asked himself the question indignantly and
contemptuously. "Can't they see what's going on under their noses? Or
don't they _wish_ to see it? Or have they been paid _not_ to see it?
Funny thing if every respectable married man is to be bothered like
this--three times in fifty yards!"

These incessant solicitations affected his nerves. So much so, indeed,
that he cursed the impudence of one woman and called her a rude name.
She did not seem to mind. While he was still in the generous afterglow
produced by a bit of plain-speaking, another one had taken her place.

With head high and shoulders squared he marched on, subject for some
distance to a purely nervous irritation, together with a disagreeably
potent memory of powdered cheeks, reddened lips, and a searching
perfume.

Then he thought of his wife, and instantly he had so vivid a
presentation of her image that it obliterated all newer visual
records. What a lady she looked when bidding him farewell at the
station. He had watched her till the train carried him out of sight--a
slender graceful figure; pale face and sad eyes; a fluttering
handkerchief and a waved parasol; then nothing at all, except a
sudden sense of emptiness in his heart.

And once more he mused with gratitude on the things that Mavis had
done for him. He thought of how she had saved him from the ugly
imaginations of his youth. How marvelously she had purified and
elevated him! He used to be afraid of himself, of all the
potentialities for evil that one takes with one across the threshold
of manhood.

The fantastic dread which recurred to his memory now, as he turned
from Dean Street into Oxford Street, had been started when he first
heard the legendary tale of Hadleigh Wood. It was said that seventy or
a hundred years ago some louts had caught girls bathing in the stream
and violated them. The legend declared that one of the offenders was
executed and the rest were sent to prison for life. Perhaps it was all
a myth, but it helped to give the upper wood a bad name; and out of
these