Dazed, I stood there. 🔊 Dazed, I turned back at length into the little room, and I suppose I paid Berthe or Rose for my dinner and luncheon and for Soames's; 🔊 I hope so, for I never went to the Vingtième again. 🔊 Ever since that night I have avoided Greek Street altogether. 🔊 And for years I did not set foot even in Soho Square, because on that same night it was there that I paced and loitered, long and long, with some such dull sense of hope as a man has in not straying far from the place where he has lost something. 🔊 "Round and round the shutter'd Square"—that line came back to me on my lonely beat, and with it the whole stanza, ringing in my brain and bearing in on me how tragically different from the happy scene imagined by him was the poet's actual experience of that prince in whom of all princes we should put not our trust! 🔊

But strange how the mind of an essayist, be it never so stricken, 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. 🔊