On the whole he felt tolerably safe in the crowded London streets.  It was not as though there was any real hue and cry after him.  The lonely Cornwall tragedy had not come into sufficient public notice for that, and now it seemed almost forgotten.

He had his hazards and chances, though in a different way.  One was an encounter with a young man of good family whose acquaintance, commenced in France during the war, had continued in London afterwards.  The two young men had seen a great deal of each other—­dining and going to music-halls together.  It was in Leicester Square that Charles saw him getting out of a taxi-cab to enter a hall where a professional billiard match was in progress.  He paused midway at the sight of Charles, exclaiming:  “Why, Tur—­” The second syllable of the name was nipped off in mid-air, and the outstretched arm was dropped, as the patron of billiards took in the cut of his former friend’s coat.  He gazed at the ill-fitting garment with a kind of astonished animosity, and then his puzzled look shot upwards to the face surmounting it, no doubt with the feeling that he may have been deceived by a chance resemblance.  Charles went past him without a sign of recognition, but he felt that the other was still staring after him.

Another day a street musician regarded him curiously from behind a barrel organ which he was turning with the lifeless celerity of one without interest in the sounds created by the process.  His card of appeal—­“Wanted in 1914; not wanted now”—­helped Charles to recall him as a soldier of his old regiment.  They exchanged glances across the card.  The man gave no sign that he knew his former officer, but Charles had no doubt that he did.  He placed a coin on top of the organ and went swiftly on.

A week of increasing strain slipped by, and another commenced.  Then Fortune, with a contemptuous good-humoured spin of her wheel, did for Charles Turold what he could hardly have hoped to achieve in a year’s effort without her aid.

It was late at night, and he was in a despondent mood after one of his recurring disappointments—­this time a graceful slender shape which he had earlier in the evening pursued in a flock of home-going shop-girls until she turned and revealed a pert Cockney face which bore no resemblance to Sisily’s.  Several hours later he paid another of his visits to Euston Square, which he believed to be the starting-point of Sisily’s own wanderings.  He felt closer to her in that locality because of that.  From Euston Square he walked on aimlessly, engrossed in impossible plans for finding Sisily by hook or crook, until the illuminated dial of a street clock, pointing to half-past ten, reminded him of the passage of time.

He paused and looked round.  He was in an area of darkened suburban streets converging on a distant broader avenue, where occasional taxi-cabs slid past into the blackness of the night with the heartless velocity of years disappearing into the gulf of Time.