He would write to North Ride and keep her informed as to his
movements.
"Good-by, my sweetheart. God bless you."
"Good luck, Will. Good luck, my dear one."
III
The devil's dance had begun.
They kept him waiting. Days passed; but his hour of crisis postponed
itself, and all things combined to enervate him. Above all, the
callous immensity of London oppressed his mind. His case, that had
been so important down there in the village, was absolutely of no
account up here in the city. Not a single sympathizer among these
millions of hurrying human beings.
The General Post Office was itself a town within a town--a mighty
labyrinth that made the imagination ache. To find one's way through a
fractional block of it, to see a thronged corner of any of its yards,
to hear even at a distance the stone thunder made by the smallest
stampede of its red carts, irresistibly evoked a realization of one's
nothingness. Never would he have believed it possible that the local
should thus shrink in presence of the central.
He had taken a bedroom on the top floor of a cheap lodging-house near
the Euston Road, and every night as he climbed the dimly-lit staircase
he knew that he was toiling upward toward a fit of depression.
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