The girl behind the counter, a short, stout woman in a purple plush bodice, tossed her head. "'Er a'ternoon orf," she explained tartly.
"Aye, but—w'ere's she gorn?"
"Walkin' out with a Blue Marine. 'Ippodrome, I think, they was goin'."
Ivor sat down and fumbled blindly in the lining of his cap for his pipe. Save for a spot of colour on either cheek-bone, his face was an ugly grey.
"Fine upstanding feller, 'e was too," added the barmaid, weighing Ivor in the balance of comparison, and finding him somewhat wanting. Ivor nodded dully, and for a while examined with apparently absorbed interest an advertisement on the wall opposite. Passion surged through him in waves that made the skin of his forehead tingle. So she'd bilked him after all: given him the go-by for a Blue Marine! Ivor knew him too, ... had once even stood him a drink.... The Adam's-apple in his throat worked like a piston.
Presently the girl behind the bar looked up from her occupation of drying glasses and eyed him curiously; but all she saw was a small dark man, who sucked hard at an empty pipe, one fist clenched tightly in his trousers pocket, staring hard at an advertisement for somebody's whisky.
At length, out of the chaos of his thoughts, two courses of action took shape and presented themselves for consideration. One was to bash the Blue Marine into irrecognition; the other was to get mercifully drunk as soon as possible. The Blue Marine, Ivor remembered, scaled a matter of fourteen stone, so he chose the latter alternative, and for thirty-six hours Oblivion, as understood by men of His Majesty's Forces, received him into her arms.
III.
"Did remain absen' over leave thirty-six tours, under haggravated circumstances," declaimed the Master-at-Arms.
It was the first time Ivor had broken his leave for three years. His head ached intolerably: he felt sick, too, and heard as from an infinite distance the cool, crisp tones of the Commander, who spoke sternly of the penalties attached to "not playing the game." Ivor listened sullenly. It was another and an older game he had tried to play,—a game in which Fate seemed to hold most of the trumps. There was a good deal more in the same strain about the abuse of privileges, and it all ended in his being placed in the Captain's Report, to stand over till next day.