"Your chauffeur would like to know, what time you will have the car?"

"Directly after dinner."

Twenty minutes later, he was turning through the scrolled iron gates
into the road for London. It was falling dark; and in the tremulous sky
clouds were piled up, and drifted here and there with a sort of endless
lack of purpose. No direction seemed to have been decreed unto their
wings. They had met together in the firmament like a flock of giant
magpies crossing and re-crossing each others' flight. The smell of rain
was in the air. The car raised no dust, but bored swiftly on, searching
out the road with its lamps. On Putney Bridge its march was stayed by
a string of waggons. Lord Valleys looked to right and left. The river
reflected the thousand lights of buildings piled along her sides, lamps
of the embankments, lanterns of moored barges. The sinuous pallid body
of this great Creature, for ever gliding down to the sea, roused in his
mind no symbolic image. He had had to do with her, years back, at the
Board of Trade, and knew her for what she was, extremely dirty, and
getting abominably thin just where he would have liked her plump. Yet,
as he lighted a cigar, there came to him a queer feeling--as if he were
in the presence of a woman he was fond of.

"I hope to God," he thought, "nothing'll come of these scares!" The
car glided on into the long road, swarming with traffic, towards the
fashionable heart of London. Outside stationers' shops, however, the
posters of evening papers were of no reassuring order.

'THE PLOT THICKENS.'
'MORE REVELATIONS.'
'GRAVE SITUATION THREATENED.'