haunted by forebodings to which he had not cared to assign a shape too definite; phantoms which he exorcised hopefully, with a tacit reliance on a trick of falling on his feet which had seldom failed his need. He consoled himself with the thought that London was home, England was home; he would meet old comrades in the streets perhaps, assuredly at his club, and such encounters would be so much the more delightful if they were fortuitous, unexpected. The plans which he had laid so carefully pacing the long deck of the P. and O. boat in the starlight, or, more remotely, lying awake through the hot night hours under a whining punkah in his lonely bungalow, had all implied, however vaguely and impersonally, a certain companionship. He was dimly conscious that he had cousins somewhere in the background; he had long since lost touch with them, but he would look them up. He had two nieces, still in their teens, the children of his only sister who had died ten years ago; he had never seen them, but their photographs were charming—they should be overwhelmed with such benefactions as a bachelor uncle with a well-lined purse may pleasantly bestow. His friends—the dim legion that was to rise about his path—should take him to see Sarah Bernhardt (a mere name to him as yet) at the Gaiety, to the new Gilbert and Sullivan opera at the Savoy; they should enlighten him as to the latent merits of the pictures at Burlington House; they should dine with him, shoot with him, be introduced to his Indian falcons; in a word, he would keep open house, in town and country too, for all good fellows and their pretty wives. It had even occurred to him, as a possibility neither remote nor unattractive, that he might himself one day possess a pretty wife to welcome them.
His sanguine expectations encountered their first rebuff when he found the Piccadilly Club, which had figured so often in thedreams
