For hours he had thus striven to banish his loneliness, but our deceptions fail at last even to deceive ourselves. His instincts were bent on finding Betty; and the gloom of the dying day, though it thwarted his eyesight and raised disturbing ghosts of thought, held the whisper of the fact that he had come near to the flying glimpse of her. It was as though her skirts had rustled across his dreams in the ornate halls of the Malahides, flipped into a baffling doorway, and vanished into mocking silence—yet but a door between. He fretted that he could find no slightest trace of her.
He flung down his pen; arose from his desk in the dusky gloom; dressed for the street; and strolled out of his rooms aimlessly into the grey of the evening that held the old quadrangle in a smoky stillness.
In the vexed traffic of the Strand he suddenly bethought him of Devlin; and straightway turned his steps towards the barber’s.
As he reached the corner of the street where Devlin plied the scissors, he saw Myre hail a hansom and drive off in it.
Noll, entering the barber’s room, was greeted by the little cockney Irishman with frantic delight; and Noll himself was glad to step back across the threshold into his old world.
He gave up his hat to the dandified little man and sat down in the barber’s chair before the mirror, the little man fussing about him the while.
“Devlin,” said he, lying back in the chair, “I saw Mr. Myre leaving this place——”
Devlin flung a large white pinafore round the youth and tied it at the back of his neck.
“That’s so, sir,” said Devlin. He tucked some white towels under his chin. “And faith, it’s quite the great man he is now.”
“Hoho!” said Noll—“affluent and well-to-do, eh? I suppose he has quite divorced himself from Art, then!”