roves and ranges! I remember pausing before a wide door-step and
wondering if perchance it was on this very one that the young De
Quincey lay ill and faint while poor Ann flew as fast as her feet would
carry her to Oxford Street, the "stony-hearted stepmother" of them both,
and came back bearing that "glass of port wine and spices" but for which
he might, so he thought, actually have died. Was this the very door-step
that the old De Quincey used to revisit in homage? I pondered Ann's
fate, the cause of her sudden vanishing from the ken of her boy friend;
and presently I blamed myself for letting the past override the present.
Poor vanished Soames!

And for myself, too, I began to be troubled. What had I better do?
Would there be a hue and cry--"Mysterious Disappearance of an Author,"
and all that? He had last been seen lunching and dining in my company.
Hadn't I better get a hansom and drive straight to Scotland Yard? They
would think I was a lunatic. After all, I reassured myself, London was a
very large place, and one very dim figure might easily drop out of it
unobserved, now especially, in the blinding glare of the near Jubilee.
Better say nothing at all, I thought.

AND I was right. Soames's disappearance made no stir at all. He was
utterly forgotten before any one, so far as I am aware, noticed that he was
no longer hanging around. Now and again some poet or prosaist may
have said to another, "What has become of that man Soames?" but I
never heard any such question asked. As for his landlady in Dyott Street,
no doubt he had paid her weekly, and what possessions he may have had
in his rooms were enough to save her from fretting. The solicitor through
whom he was paid his annuity may be presumed to have made inquiries,
but no echo of these resounded. There was something rather ghastly to
me in the general unconsciousness that Soames had existed, and more