Yet he walked like a thief, conscious through all the transcendent glow of a half-guilty rapture, glorying, though fearfully, in the thought of the treasure whose shrine he had desecrated to possess. He had never dreamed at one time of such a thing. It had come to him in a single moment how he, bred and educated under the severest maternal discipline, “cabin’d, cribbed, confined” within the narrowest limits of orthodoxy, was still not excluded from the destinies which Love creates. Why should he be? A King, and denied the prerogative of his meanest subject? His way did not lie far through that garden of lamps; but others were incessantly crossing and obstructing it. These shadows worried him: he seemed to know so many of them, yet the instant he thought to identify one it would fade and disappear. Along Pall Mall, across St. James’s Square, into Charles Street, and thence towards the glare and bustle of the Market--throughout the whole short route it was always the same. Thicker and thicker they came, hurrying across his path, until at length he could hardly force his way through the press. Their insistence, their air of urgency, amazed and troubled him; yet, possessed of a stubborn will, he would not be gainsaid. He knew the goal of his wild desires, and inch by inch he fought his way to attain it. And then in a moment he was standing before the door, and he saw that it was closed and dark. The whole house was lightless, the window-panes were broken, there was no sign of life in all the empty place. With a gasp he stepped back into the kennel. What did it mean? Had he all this time been dreaming a dream, never realising its unreality, of a little Quaker bird whose song had once filled his soul with a passion for possession? Had there ever been for him a “Nanny,” a large-eyed, lovely child, who had captivated him with her sweet looks and words, and been lost somewhere in the gulfs of the dead past? For whom, then, if not for him? He could remember her pretty ways; the very tones of her young voice when she first called him “Friend,” and choked over the whispered daring. And what then--what thereafter? Surely no dream?