"But it's better now?" she asked.
"Shouldn't have showed my face here if it wasn't," Paul retorted, with a flicker of his old spirit. "The luck changed just when I'd about decided to go back to Grimes. Yes, I'm doing so-so. Nothing record-breaking, but I'm out of debt."
"I'm very glad."
"Thanks," he said gratefully. "You've no call to be, God knows! When I think—but what's the good? I've thought till I'm half crazy. Just to look into the little place at the Lorna Doone queers a whole week for me. It stands about as it did, Jean. All the time the pinch was hardest, I had to carry the flat, too—empty. I couldn't live there, and nobody else wanted it. I missed my chance to clear out when the building changed hands—I tumbled just too late, not being on the spot. The new owners would make trouble, and I've had trouble enough. I just can't sell the things—leastways some of them—and I thought perhaps you—they're really yours, you know—perhaps you—No? Well, I don't blame you. If folks were only living there, I guess I'd feel different. I would sublet for a song."
Amy's consuming desire flashed into Jean's mind to relieve a situation too tense for long endurance, and Paul thankfully made note of the drummer's address. This mechanical act seemed to put a period to their meeting and both rose; but although they shook hands again, and exchanged commonplaces concerning neither knew what, the man continued to imprison her fingers in an awkward solemnity which, more sharply than words, conveyed his sense of a bitter, yet just, finality.
So occupied, Atwood's hurried entrance found them.
"I'm late, very late," he said from the hall, at first seeing only Jean; "but the cab-horse looks promising, and the driver says—I beg your pardon!"
Acutely conscious of a burning flush, which Paul's red-hot confusion answered like an afterglow, Jean made the presentation.
"Bartlett—not Barclay," Paul corrected Atwood's murmured greeting, with the footless particularity of the embarrassed.
"I beg your pardon," said Atwood again.