“No, Routledge-san, you have given your reddest blood and whitest fire to old Mother Asia. Would it be fair and clean of you to yoke the remnant--and such an earthy remnant--with the lofty purity of Noreen Cardinegh?” Long he stood there in the depths of thinking, until startled by the softly uttered name: “Routledge-san.” He was sure his own lips had not formed the syllables. He wondered if it had winged across the city from Cheer Street.... His glance fell to the road. Below, and a little to the right he perceived the White Mustache. Routledge seized his hat and descended quickly, but the stranger was gone. For a half-hour he tried to trap the other into a meeting, but in vain. It was after mid-day and raining. He had intended to go to the _Review_ office, but the old leathern chair and the friendly lodging lured him back. To-morrow would do for the _Review_. To-night, the Army and Navy reception. Everybody he knew would be there.... She had asked him to come to Cheer Street, but he could not bring himself to break in upon old Jerry’s home-coming. He stirred the fire and fell to musing again in the glow. FIFTH CHAPTER ROUTLEDGE STEPS OUT SPIRITEDLY IN THE FOG TO FIND HIS FRIENDS AND ENCOUNTERS THE HATE OF LONDON Routledge left his lodgings a little before nine that night, and breasted the February fog in his great frieze coat. He was minded to hail a cab when he wearied of walking, but the time and distance were put behind with a glow and a gradually quickening pace. It was a good four miles from Bookstalls to Trafalgar Square and the Armory where the Army and Navy reception was held. He skirted Hyde Park, now in the zenith of its season, and glimpsed Piccadilly again. Its full electric bloom was a ghastly sheen in the fog. London, the old and blackened brick Mammoth, was sweet to him, even now vaporing in her night-sweat.... He had thought of these shops, clubs, lights, smells, and monuments in the long, heaven-clear Indian nights. Afar in the Himalayas, where the old Earth-mother strains hungrily toward the stars (as does the soul of man who broods in those austere heights), he had thought hard upon these stirring pavements and yearned for them in red moments of memory. In the rice-lands of Rangoon; in the cotton country Bombayward; in the bazaars of Lahore; overlooking the plains from Simla; in the under-world of Calcutta, and the house-tops of Benares--he had mapped these streets in reflection and colored certain land-marks with desire. Here, in his own world-yard again, walking for an hour through the centre of London, and not a human had hailed him. The strokes of ten boomed down from some spire lost in the muffling mists. “One would have to carry a lantern, like the old prophet of the barrel-house, to find his playmates in a night like this. Besides,” he added, “most of my playmates by this time are bathing in the vanities across the Square.”