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lived, and little of her circumstances; for it had been part of the
delight of her girlish romance that he should know nothing of her,
nothing of the difference of their station. The ways of the city opened
before him east and west, north and south. Even in Victorian days London
was a maze, that little London with its poor four millions of people;
but the London he explored, the London of the twenty-second century, was
a London of thirty million souls. At first he was energetic and
headlong, taking time neither to eat nor sleep. He sought for weeks and
months, he went through every imaginable phase of fatigue and despair,
over-excitement and anger. Long after hope was dead, by the sheer
inertia of his desire he still went to and fro, peering into faces and
looking this way and that, in the incessant ways and lifts and passages
of that interminable hive of men.
At last chance was kind to him, and he saw her.
It was in a time of festivity. He was hungry; he had paid the inclusive
fee and had gone into one of the gigantic dining-places of the city; he
was pushing his way among the tables and scrutinising by mere force of
habit every group he passed.
He stood still, robbed of all power of motion, his eyes wide, his lips
apart. Elizabeth sat scarcely twenty yards away from him, looking
straight at him. Her eyes were as hard to him, as hard and
expressionless and void of recognition, as the eyes of a statue.
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