When I reached the light and warmth of the tube, I could analyse calmly my curious surrender to panic on my way up Great Cumberland Place. A London fog, as I had told Barbara, was no new phenomenon to me; apart from its dirt, I rather enjoyed one for its mystery and romance. If the order of interrogation had been reversed, I should have assured the policeman that I anticipated no trouble and that the hunger-marchers were too tired, too ill-acquainted with London to provoke a riot. I believed every word that I had said to my wife; I am not more nervous than most short-sighted and unadventurous men of forty; and yet for a moment I had entirely lost my head. Was this due to Barbara’s sudden collapse? Were my own nerves cracking? In the familiar long car, staring up at the well-known advertisements, I was myself again. I could dismiss all thoughts of imminent death, hanging over the house like a bird of doom, as lightly as they would have been dismissed by my stolid neighbours in the train. Barbara, for some reason, was overexcited. In my uncle’s last illness she had felt—or said she felt—the presence of death; she added then, with something of the same terror, that, if she ever heard my life was in danger, she would be dragged out of her indifference. We had been talking, throughout luncheon, of possible riots; I had arrived unexpectedly because I was anxious for her safety; a cell in her unconscious mind might well have retained our conversation as I drove to my uncle’s death-bed. Was it necessary to probe deeper than that? What mattered, what I could not yet begin to realize was that Barbara and I were at last one flesh and spirit. When I returned to her . . . I wondered whether I had done wisely in leaving her. When I remembered the last poignant attitude in which I had seen her, kneeling upright with closed eyes and praying distractedly, I felt unforgivably callous. “For a casual promise to a friend,” I told myself indignantly; “when I’ve assured her he’s in no danger . . .” As the train ran in to Oxford Circus, I rose from my seat. Then I sat down again; rose again; sat down again . . . till the conductor called sharply: “Now, make up your mind, sir.” I made up my mind and went on to Chancery Lane. I must keep my word to O’Rane. Had I wished to break it, I could not; and, with this sense of impotence, something of my old anxiety returned. Raney would not have summoned me for a trifle; if he needed me, there was danger; yet I had told Barbara that I should be as safe with him as if I stayed in Seymour Street. . . . From Chancery Lane I stumbled to my office at a pace that left no time for morbid fancies. O’Rane was in my room, sitting by the fire and slapping a stick lazily against his boot. I have never seen any one less like a figure of destiny, urging me to an unknown doom. At the vaguest hint, he would have insisted on my going back to Barbara. “Is there any more news?,” I asked. “I came as soon as I could.”