Now, on this June morning he had just begun to breast the slope rising from the hollow to Hyde Park Corner when a boy shot out from behind a huge, stationary dust-cart on the left and dashed unregarding towards him.  George shouted.  The boy, faced with sudden death, was happily so paralysed that he fell down, thus checking his momentum by the severest form of friction.  George swerved aside, missing the small, outstretched hands by an inch or two, but missing also by an inch or two the front wheel of a tremendous motor-bus on his right.  He gave a nervous giggle as he flashed by the high red side of the motor-bus; and then he deliberately looked back at the murderous boy, who had jumped up.  At the same moment George was brought to a sense of his own foolishness in looking back by a heavy jolt.  He had gone over half a creosoted wood block which had somehow escaped from a lozenge-shaped oasis in the road where two workmen were indolently using picks under the magic protection of a tiny, dirty red flag.  Secure in the guardianship of the bit of bunting, which for them was as powerful and sacred as the flag of an empire, the two workmen gazed with indifference at George and at the deafening traffic which swirled affronting but harmless around them.  George slackened speed, afraid lest the jar might have snapped the plates of his accumulator.  The motor-bicycle was a wondrous thing, but as capricious and delicate as a horse.  For a trifle, for nothing at all, it would cease to function.  The high-tension magneto and the float-feed carburetter, whose invention was to transform the motor-bicycle from an everlasting harassment into a means of loco-motion, were yet years away in the future.  However, the jar had done no harm.  The episode, having occupied less than ten seconds, was closed.  George felt his heart thumping.  He thought suddenly of the recent Paris-Madrid automobile race, in which the elite of the world had perished.  He saw himself beneath the motor-bus, and a futile staring crowd round about.  Simply by a miracle was he alive.  But this miracle was only one of a score of miracles.  He believed strongly in luck.  He had always believed in it.  The smoke of the cigarette displayed his confidence to all Piccadilly.  Still, his heart was thumping.

And it had not ceased to thump when a few minutes later he turned into Manresa Road.  Opposite the entrance to the alley of Romney Studios, there happened to be a small hiatus in the kerbstone.  George curved the machine largely round and, mounting the pavement through this hiatus, rode gingerly up the alley, in defiance of the regulations of a great city, and stopped precisely at the door of No. 6.  It was a matter of honour with him to arrive thus.  Not for a million would he have walked the machine up the alley.  He got off, sounded a peremptory call on the horn, and tattooed with the knocker.  No answer came.  An apprehension visited him.  By the last post on the previous night he had received a special invitation to breakfast from Marguerite.  Never had he been kept waiting at the door.  He knocked again.  Then he heard a voice from the side of the studio: