“That would depend,” said Michael. “If one married what is called an impossible person and lived up here, it ought to be romantic enough to make marriage rather more exciting than any silvery invitation to St. Thomas’ Church at half-past two.” “But why are you so keen about marriage?” Maurice demanded. “Well, it has certain advantages,” Michael pointed out. “Not among the sparrows,” said Maurice. “Most of all among the sparrows,” Michael contradicted. He was becoming absorbed by his notion of Lily in such surroundings. It seemed to remove the last doubt he had of the wisdom or necessity of the step he proposed to take. They would be able to reënter the world after a long retirement. For her it should be a convalescence, and for him the opportunity which Oxford denied to test academic values on the touchstone of human emotions. It was obvious that his education lacked something, though his academic education was finished. He supposed he had apprehended dimly the risk of this incompletion in Paris during that first Long Vacation. It was curious how already the quest of Lily had assumed less the attributes of a rescue than of a personal desire for the happiness of her company. No doubt he must be ready for a shock of disillusion when they did meet, but for the moment Drake’s account of her on the Orient Promenade lost all significance of evil. The news had merely fired him with the impulse to find her again. “It is really extraordinarily romantic up here,” Maurice exclaimed, bursting in upon his reverie. “Yes, I suppose that’s the reason,” Michael admitted. “The reason of what?” Maurice asked. “Of what I was thinking,” Michael said. Maurice waited for him to explain further, but Michael was silent; and almost immediately Castleton came back with provision for lunch. Soon after they had eaten Michael said he would leave them to their hammering. Then he went back to Cheyne Walk and, finding the house still and empty in the sunlight, he packed a kit-bag, called a hansom-cab, and told the driver to go to the Seven Sisters Road. CHAPTER II NEPTUNE CRESCENT The existence of the Seven Sisters Road had probably not occurred to Michael since in the hazel-coppices of Clere Abbey he had first made of it at Brother Aloysius’ behest the archetype of Avernus, and yet his choice of it now for entrance to the underworld was swift as instinct. The quest of Lily was already beginning to assume the character of a deliberate withdrawal from the world in which he familiarly moved. With the instant of his resolve all that in childhood and in youth he had apprehended of the dim territory, which in London sometimes lay no farther away than the other side of the road, demanded the trial of his experience.