THE SENSE OF THE PAST
but a proof that while he gazed out of the cab window during this extraordinary progress what he looked at so fixedly as to take note of no interval of speech was neither the exhibition of successive streets, with their aspects and their varieties of identity, but the portentous truth of his being launched, since, so conclusively, his counterpart in the circumstance was, and of his fate's having thereby shut down on any backward step. Not that he wanted to take one, not that he wanted to take one———he kept repeating that as the vehicle rolled; to be as "in" for whatever awaited him as he now felt, as he now absolutely knew, himself, was a strong simplification—with which wasn't it positively a blest one too? which question had not been answered in the negative, at any rate, even by the time they pulled up at the address he had given. This was what had taken place during their transit, he afterwards knew; the minutes had been so wholly given, in their course, to his inwardly sealing the charter of accommodation, as he would have called it, to whatever might now confront him that after he had got out, on the stoppage of the cab, he addressed to his companion a "Will you keep it on?" which left things taken for granted between them without a scrap of a loose end dangling. He at least suffered none such, though there might have been just the sign of a difference in his good friend's face while the latter stepped straight out by way
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