The tender came alongside the landing-stage, and he stepped ashore with the dripping crowd. The flurry of the Custom House and the transport of his meagre baggage to the railway station broke the illusion. He was in England at last, and it seemed a strange country. During the journey to London, he had the companionship of some of his fellow-travellers. At Waterloo they parted. Then he felt terribly lonely. “Cab, sir?” asked a porter. He was standing over his luggage, somewhat lost amid the bustle and tumult of the station. It was the late afternoon, and the platforms were hurrying with suburban passengers. The incessant movement through the blue glare of the electric light dazed his unaccustomed eyes. He declined the porter’s offer. Cabs were a luxury he could ill afford. Besides, one meagre Gladstone bag contained his whole possessions, and he could easily carry it. Leaving the station, he took an omnibus for Victoria, with the idea of seeking his old Pimlico lodgings. If he could not be taken in there, it would not be difficult to find a room in the neighbourhood. Still confused by the sudden transition to the midst of the roar of London, he peered through the glass sides at the wet pavements glistening in the gaslight, the shop fronts, the eternal hurrying by of vague forms, and the dash past of vehicles. From Westminster Bridge the face of Big Ben greeted him. He stared at it stupidly as long as he could see it. The light on the Clock Tower announced that the House was sitting. It was all curiously familiar, and yet he felt like an alien. There was not a soul in London to welcome his home-coming. His heart sank with the sense of loneliness. He was as infinitesimal and as isolated a unit in this seething, swarming ant-hill of humanity as amid the starry solitudes of the African veldt. As chance willed it, he found the house in Pimlico in the same hands as before, and his old room in the attics vacant. Nothing had altered, except that it looked smaller and four years shabbier. The same discoloured blind hung before the window, the same fly-blown texts adorned the walls. The same acrid smell of dust and ashes and earth and the unaired end of all human things met his nostrils. When he went to sleep that night, it seemed incredible that four years should have passed since he had last lain there.