lift his voice backward and lay it dead inside the cab.
He gazed upon Picadilly with eyes from which the scales had fallen. Reason told him that he was still in Picadilly. Otherwise it would have seemed incredible to him that this could be the same street which a moment before he had passed judgment upon and found flat and uninteresting. True, in its salient features it had altered little. The same number of stodgy-looking people moved up and down. The buildings retained their air of not having had a bath since the days of the Tudors. The east wind still blew. But, though superficially the same, in reality Piccadilly had altered completely. Before it had been just Piccadilly. Now it was a golden street in the City of Romance, a main thoroughfare of Bagdad, one of the principal arteries of the capital of Fairyland. A rose-colored mist swam before George’s eyes. His spirits, so low but a few moments back, soared like a good niblick shot out of the bunker of gloom. The years fell away from him, till in an instant, from being a rather poorly preserved, liverish graybeard of sixty-five or so, he became a sprightly lad of twenty-one in a world of springtime and flowers and laughing brooks. In other words, taking it by and large, George felt pretty good. The impossible had happened; heaven had sent him an adventure; and he didn’t care if it snowed.
It was possibly the rose-colored mist before his eyes that prevented him from observing the hurried approach of a faultlessly attired young man, aged about twenty-one, who during George’s preparations for insuring privacy in his cab had been galloping in pursuit in a resolute manner that suggested a well-
