Sable garments fluttering, Care fell into step with Philip Kirkwood; Care the inexorable slipped a skeleton arm through his and would not be denied; Care the jade clung affectionately to his side, refusing to be jilted.
"Ah, you thought you would forget me?" chuckled the fleshless lips by his ear. "But no, my boy; I'm with you now, for ever and a day. 'Misery loves company,' and it wouldn't be pretty of me to desert you in this extremity, would it? Come, let us beguile the hours till dawn with conversation. Here's a sprightly subject: What are you going to do, Mr. Kirkwood? What are you going to do?"
But Kirkwood merely shook a stubborn head and gazed straight before him, walking fast through ways he did not recognize, and pretending not to hear. None the less the sense of Care's solicitous query struck like a pain into his consciousness. What was he to do?
An hour passed.
Denied the opportunity to satisfy its beast hunger and thirst, humanity goes off to its beds. In that hour London quieted wonderfully; the streets achieved an effect of deeper darkness, the skies, lowering, looked down with a blush less livid for the shamelessness of man; cab ranks lengthened; solitary footsteps added unto themselves loud, alarming, offensive echoes; policemen, strolling with lamps blazing on their breasts, became as lightships in a trackless sea; each new-found street unfolded its perspective like a canyon of mystery, and yet teeming with a hundred masked hazards; the air acquired a smell more clear and clean, an effect more volatile; and the night-mist thickened until it studded one's attire with myriads of tiny buttons, bright as diamond dust.
Through this long hour Kirkwood walked without a pause.
Another clock, somewhere, clanged resonantly twice.
The world was very still....
And so, wandering foot-loose in a wilderness of ways, turning aimlessly, now right, now left, he found himself in a street he knew, yet seemed not to know: a silent, black street one brief block in length, walled with dead and lightless dwellings, haunted by his errant memory; a street whose atmosphere was heavy with impalpable essence of desuetude; in two words, Frognall Street.
Kirkwood identified it with a start and a guilty tremor. He stopped stock-still, in an unreasoning state of semi-panic, arrested by a silly impulse to turn and fly; as if the bobby, whom he descried approaching him with measured stride, pausing now and again to try a door or flash his bull's-eye down an area, were to be expected to identify the man responsible for that damnable racket raised ere midnight in vacant Number 9!