A growing distaste for the forced acquaintanceships of travel and a craving for home brought me back. Save perhaps in health I had profited little by my journeyings. My bodily shell formed part of strange landscapes and occurred in fortuitous gatherings of men, but my heart was all the time in my Mausoleum by the Regent’s Park. I was drawn thither by a force almost magnetic, irresistible. My two domestics welcomed me home, but no one else. Only my lawyers knew of my arrival. With them alone had I corresponded during the many months of my absence. Stay; I did write one letter to Mrs. McMurray while I was at Verona, in reply to an enquiry as to what had become of Carlotta and myself. I answered courteously but briefly that Carlotta had run away with Pasquale and that I should be abroad for an indefinite period. But not even a letter from my lawyers awaited me. I thought somewhat wistfully that I would willingly have paid six and eight pence for it. But the feeling was momentary. Then began a queer, untroubled life. Without definite resolve I became a recluse, living forlornly from day to day. Like a bat I avoided the outer sunshine and took my melancholy walks at night. I had a pride in cherishing the habit of solitude. Were it not that I entertained a real dislike of roots and water and the damp and manifold discomforts of a cave, with which form of habitat the ministrations of Stenson and Antoinette would have been inconsistent, I should have gone forth into the nearest approach to a Thebaid I could discover. I was, in fact, touched by the mild mania of the hermit. My club I never entered. A line drawn from east to west, a tangent at the lowest point of the Zoological Gardens formed the southern boundary of my wanderings. Once I spied in the distance that very kind soul, Mrs. McMurray, and rushed into a providential omnibus, so as to avoid recognition. My History remained untouched. The glamour of the Renaissance had vanished. For occupation I read the Neo-Platonists, Thaumaturgy, Demonology and the like, which I had always found a fascinating although futile study. I regretted my bowing acquaintance with modern science, which forbade my setting up a laboratory with alembics and magic crystals wherewith to conduct experiments for the finding of the Elixir Vitae and the Philosopher’s Stone. I seldom read the newspapers. I had an idea, like an eminent personage of the period, that a sort of war was going on, but it failed to interest me greatly. I shrank from the noise of it. “Monsieur,” said Antoinette, “will get ill if he does not go out into the sunshine.” “Monsieur,” said I, “regards the sunshine as an impertinent intrusion into a soul that loves the twilight.”