He sat near a glass screen some six or seven feet high, dividing the room in two. Suddenly from the other side of it came a voice:
"Hallo, is that you, Hayes? Come and have your coffee with us. Where have you been all this time?"
There they sat—and there they might have been sitting ever since Andy parted from them, so much at home they looked—Billy Foot, the Nun, and Miss Dutton. Another young man was with them, completing the party. He was plump, while Billy was thin—placid, while Billy always suggested a reserve of excitement; but he had a likeness to Billy all the same.
"Oh, I say, may I come?" cried Andy, boyishly loud; but the luck of meeting these friends again was too extraordinary. He trotted round the glass screen with his tumbler in his hand; he had not quite finished his lager beer.
"Chair and coffee for Mr. Hayes," said Billy Foot. "You remember him, girls? My brother, Hayes—Gilly, Mr. Hayes. How did you leave Harry?"
"How awfully funny I should meet you!" gasped Andy.
"It's not funny if you ever come here," observed Miss Dutton; "because we come here nearly every day—with somebody." She was more sardonic than ever.
The Nun—she was not, by the way, a Nun any longer, but a Quaker girl ("All in the same line," her manager said, with a fine indifference to the smaller theological distinctions), and now sang of how, owing to her having to wear sombre garments (expressed by a charming dove-tinted costume that sent the stalls mad), she had lost her first and only love—the Nun smiled at Andy in a most friendly fashion.
"I'd quite forgotten you," she remarked, "but I'm glad to see you again. Let's see, you're—?"
"Harry Belfield's friend."