There was only one thing that had an
absolute value for each individual, and it was
just that original impulse, that internal heat,
that feeling of one's self in one's own breast.
When Alexander walked back to his hotel,
the red and green lights were blinking
along the docks on the farther shore,
and the soft white stars were shining
in the wide sky above the river.
The next night, and the next, Alexander
repeated this same foolish performance.
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.
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