“Would you care to go to the Alhambra or somewhere?” he suggested, having a notion that this was the correct thing to say to a lady whose presence near you was directly due to her desire for marriage.

“It’s very good of you,” said she.  “But I’m sure you only say it out of kindness—­because you’re a gentleman.  It wouldn’t be quite nice for you to go to a music-hall to-night.  I know I said I was free for the evening, but I wasn’t thinking.  It wasn’t a hint—­no, truly!  I think I shall go home—­and perhaps some other——­”

“I shall see you home,” said he quickly.  Impulsive, again!

“Would you really like to?  Can you?” In the bluish glare of an electricity that made the street whiter than day, she blushed.  Yes, she blushed like a girl.

She led him up a side-street where was a kind of railway station unfamiliar to Priam Farll’s experience, tiled like a butcher’s shop and as clean as Holland.  Under her direction he took tickets for a station whose name he had never heard of, and then they passed through steel railings which clacked behind them into a sort of safe deposit, from which the only emergence was a long dim tunnel.  Painted hands, pointing to the mysterious word ‘lifts,’ waved you onwards down this tunnel.  “Hurry up, please,” came a voice out of the spectral gloom.  Mrs. Challice thereupon ran.  Now up the tunnel, opposing all human progress there blew a steady trade-wind of tremendous force.  Immediately Priam began to run the trade-wind removed his hat, which sailed buoyantly back towards the street.  He was after it like a youth of twenty, and he recaptured it.  But when he reached the extremity of the tunnel his amazed eyes saw nothing but a great cage of human animals pressed tightly together behind bars.  There Was a click, and the whole cage sank from his sight into the earth.

He felt that there was more than he had dreamt of in the city of miracles.  In a couple of minutes another cage rose into the tunnel at a different point, vomited its captives and descended swiftly again with Priam and many others, and threw him and the rest out into a white mine consisting of numberless galleries.  He ran about these interminable galleries underneath London, at the bidding of painted hands, for a considerable time, and occasionally magic trains without engines swept across his vision.  But he could not find even the spirit of Mrs. Alice Challice in this nether world.

The Nest

On letter-paper headed “Grand Babylon Hotel, London,” he was writing in a disguised backward hand a note to the following effect:  “Duncan Farll, Esq.  Sir,—­If any letters or telegrams arrive for me at Selwood Terrace, be good enough to have them forwarded to me at once to the above address.—­Yours truly, H. Leek.”  It cost him something to sign the name of the dead man; but he instinctively guessed that Duncan Farll might be a sieve which (owing to its legal-mindedness) would easily get clogged up even by a slight suspicion.