They were under the archway by this time, in the brief shelter of which the sanguine-faced, red-waist-coated lodge-keeper was taking his nightly constitutional. They answered the touch of the hat with which he saluted them.
‘Which is your way?’ asked Mr. Barter.
‘Westward,’ said Phil.
‘Mine is east,’ said Barter, ‘so we part here. We are bound to meet again before long. Good-night.’
‘Good-night, and many thanks for taking my clumsiness in such good part.’
Barter’s ready smile beamed out again. They shook hands before parting like old acquaintances, and Philip walked on, through the incessant noise of Holborn into quieter Bloomsbury Street, along the eastern side of Bedford Square, where the bare trees were shivering in a bath of fog, and into Gower Street. Half way down that hideous thoroughfare he came upon a house, one of the few which still retain the old lamp-iron and extinguisher before their doors, and knocking, was admitted by a trim maid, with the smiling alacrity due to a frequent and favoured visitor, and by her conducted to the drawing-room, where sat a young lady engaged in a transparent pretence of being absorbed in a novel. The pretence vanished as the door closed behind the handmaiden, and the young lady jumped up and ran forward to meet him, with such a glad welcome in her face as answered the appeal in his own. It does not need that we should look at her with Philip’s eyes to pronounce her charmingly pretty, or to admire the face, at once shy and frank, with which she nestled beside him.
‘I thought you were never coming,’ she said.
‘Am I so late, then?’
‘It seemed so, and now you are come, tell me what you have been doing.’
‘Working, and thinking of you.’