I kept my eyes lifting, too, as I walked about the streets, but there was no sign anywhere of the skin coats or the weird stringed instruments.

The whole Company of the Rosy Hours seemed to have melted into the air, and I began to wonder if they had ever existed.
Anxiety made me restless, and restlessness made me want exercise.

It was no good walking about the city.

The weather had become foul again, and I was sick of the smells and the squalor and the flea-bitten crowds.

So Blenkiron and I got horses, Turkish cavalry mounts with heads like trees, and went out through the suburbs into the open country.
It was a grey drizzling afternoon, with the beginnings of a sea fog which hid the Asiatic shores of the straits.