WINTRY weather, with warm mists, good weather for the reawakening of the larger saurians. Mauve arc lamps throwing their beams on the asphalt, like lamps in recessed bedsteads shining on the sheets. The omnibuses steeped their headlights in the wood block roadway as in some deep canal. He struck the Thames at Victoria Embankment, along which the tramway cars, bearing up from the suburbs vegetable smells and dead leaves caught in their trolley wheels, ran with great shrieking violin notes that made one shudder like the playing of a Jewish virtuoso. In the middle of the river, their noses to the tide, the barges slumbered lethargically, like sombre prehistoric animals in the silvery stream. Cleopatra's needle, whose proud erection tapered off into the fog, was balanced on the opposite side of the river by the pylon of Lipton's warehouse. Lewis looked at Big Ben to see the time. He saw the Houses of Parliament, that Gothic prison from which all modern liberty has sprung. It was nearly midnight, the two hands being almost at the present arms. Suddenly he remembered that the Continental boat train left in twenty-five minutes. After all, what more had he to do in London? He went to his hotel, had his luggage brought down, and caught the train without having had time to change his clothes. The Boulogne fishing smacks leaving the harbour before dawn, their sails filled by the gentle breeze that precedes sunrise and with big fires on their bridges which threw huge shadows of the fishermen on to the sails, saw, not without some surprise, a passenger in dress clothes leaning over the prow of the steamer and towering above the spray with his silk hat. Lewis had completely forgotten Irene. As each wave broke Lewis thought of Irene. XIV IT is one of the great advantages of travel that one always gains forty-eight hours before and eight days afterwards by not telling anyone that one has started or returned. Lewis did not go near Madame Magnac. He worked all day and stayed at home every evening in the hope that Irene would ring him up. One evening, towards midnight, he had turned out the light and was thinking of her, far away, cut off from him by the sea, and yet, in this room with him (she was in his arms, he was holding her so closely that her breasts were crushed together), when the telephone bell rang. It was like a pistol shot fired beneath his pillow. It might be Elsie Magnac. He unhooked the receiver and suddenly Irene was close to him, seemed to be sitting at the foot of his bed in the dark: she had telephoned to him whilst he was invoking her, waking him up, and taking advantage of his sleepiness to break his solitude and to insinuate herself into one of those dark corners into which one's daily worries retreat subconsciously during the night. "Have you been thinking of me, Irene?" She answered in a low constrained voice:-- "Of course."