The seductive, amiable, and brilliant woman, who had so nearly succeeded in casting over him a delicious spell, began to fade from his consciousness like the intangible occupant of a dream. She had no appeal for him now. The feast at the restaurant, that phase of color, warmth, and splendor in which for an hour the squalor of his existence had been dispelled; the struggle to retain the treasure which had been entrusted to his keeping by a supernatural agent; the bizarre incident of the hansom cabman; and the personality of the genial god out of the machine had now ceased to have significance. Indeed one thing alone merged his faculties in his overstimulated thoughts. It was the packet which he could feel in the breast-pocket of his coat, towards which his hands were straying constantly. These pages of foolscap bound with red tape, were they not his magic talisman? By that occult presence had not his thwarted bleak and empty life been changed into an electrical existence crowded with glory? His brain bursting with ideas, he began to run faster and faster through the maze of endless streets, lined with high garden walls, portentously respectable dwelling-houses, lamps, shops, and secretive silent-footed policemen. These frequently flashed their lanterns upon him, for the manner of his progress had an illegal air. Even at the height of this orgy of freedom, the question shaped itself with the oddest definiteness as to whether it would not be expedient to curb his paces, since if he were stopped, he feared lest he should be able to render an account of himself that would be sufficiently lucid to commend itself to the myrmidons of the law. When at last his exertions had thrown him out of breath, and his frame did not respond with quite the same unanimity to his passion, he stopped under a lamp in the middle of a street on the side of a steep hill, took out the precious document he carried, and began to peruse it for sheer human pleasure. He even pressed his lips to this prosaic thing, with no less of fervor, indeed with more abandonment than he had saluted the hand of the sorceress who had been the means of restoring it to his care. “I must make her my saint, I must burn candles to her,” he muttered, recalling her image with a sense of rapture. As he stood under the lamp, a very large and slow-footed policeman waddled up towards him, trying doors and casting the light of his lantern down the areas he passed. As he went by, keenly scrutinizing the figure of the young man, yet pretending not to notice it, Northcote hailed him. “Where might I be, policeman? I am strange to these parts.” “Well,” said the policeman slowly and with effort, “you might be in Balham, but you ain’t. Likewise, you might be at Charing Cross, but you are not there, nuther.”