It was always Miss Burgoyne whom he started out to find, and he got no farther than the Temple gardens and the Embankment.

It was a pleasant kind of loneliness.

To a man who was so little given to reflection, whose dreams always took the form of definite ideas, reaching into the future, there was a seductive excitement in renewing old experiences in imagination.

He started out upon these walks half guiltily, with a curious longing and expectancy which were wholly gratified by solitude.

Solitude, but not solitariness; for he walked shoulder to shoulder with a shadowy companion--not little Hilda Burgoyne, by any means, but some one vastly dearer to him than she had ever been--his own young self, the youth who had waited for him upon the steps of the British Museum that night, and who, though he had tried to pass so quietly, had known him and come down and linked an arm in his.
It was not until long afterward that Alexander learned that for him this youth was the most dangerous of companions.
One Sunday evening, at Lady Walford's, Alexander did at last meet Hilda Burgoyne.