"Ah! She'd got my telegram then."
Ted bit his lip. They were too much absorbed, he in his misery and Hardy in his joy, for either to be conscious of the other's feeling.
"Old boy," said Hardy, as they turned out of the King's Road, "what have you got to do?"
"Nothing."
"Then come and help me to hunt up some diggings. How about Devon Street?"
"I don't know; but I suppose we can look," said Ted, dismally. Hardy's spirits were beginning to pall on him.
"I may as well go and look up Katherine, while I'm about it. Dear old Sis, I suppose she'll be out too."
"Not she—she's too busy for that."
"Not too busy to see her old playfellow, you bet your boots."
He was so glad to see everybody again that he was sure everybody must be glad to see him. In his rapture at being in London, the place he loathed and execrated a year ago, he could have embraced the stranger in the street. Those miles of pavement, those towering walls that seemed to make streets of the sky as he looked up, all that world of brick and mortar was Audrey's world, the ground for her feet, the scene of all her doings. The women that went by wore the fashions she would be wearing now. At any moment she herself might turn out of some shop-door, round some corner. A faint hope that he might find her with Katherine had led him to Devon Street.