CHAPTER X.I AM CAUGHT UP INTO LIFE.
I can scarcely convey in written words the whirling emotions I felt when I entered the city of Kilburn.

Every sight, every sound, recalled vividly and painfully the unhappy years I had once spent in another and greater city.

Every mingled odour of the streets--and there is nothing that will so surely re-create (for me) the inner emotion of a time or place as a remembered odour--brought back to me the incidents of that immemorial existence.
For a time, I confess it frankly here, I felt afraid.

More than once I stopped short in the street where I was walking, and considered turning about and making again for the open country.

Some there may be who will feel that I am exaggerating my sensations and impressions, but they do not know of my memories of a former life, nor of how, many years ago, I left the city quite defeated, glad indeed that I was escaping, and thinking (as I have related elsewhere) that I should never again set foot upon a paved street.