CHAPTER XV
It was raining and miserable when Micky arrived in London. The roads were wet and slippery, and every taxi and omnibus splashed pedestrians with mud.
Micky shivered as he stood waiting while a porter lugged his traps down from the rack. He had felt depressed in Paris, but now London seemed a thousand times worse. The sight of Driver waiting on the platform annoyed him. He answered the man’s stolid greeting snappishly. He had wanted to come home, and yet now he was here he wished himself a thousand miles away. He leaned back in a corner of the taxi and shut his eyes.
The last four days had got on his nerves; Esther’s letter in his pocket was like an eternal reproach.
Why had he come back at all? She did not want him––nobody wanted him in the whole forsaken world. The silence of his flat seemed a thing to be dreaded in his present mood. Driver’s inscrutable face would, he felt, drive him mad. With sudden impulse he leaned forward and called to the chauffeur, “Stop––I’ve changed my mind––drive me back to the Savoy....”
There would be life there, at any rate––life and people and music––something to make a man forget the depression that sat like a ton weight on his shoulders.
He felt utterly at a loose end; he stalked moodily into the lounge. There were many people there, girls in pretty dinner frocks, with their attendant cavaliers. Micky glanced at none of them, till suddenly a girl who had been sitting on a couch listening rather listlessly to the conversation of a youth beside her, rose to her feet when she saw Micky, the hot colour flying to her cheeks.
For a moment she hesitated, waiting for him to look 139 at her, to speak––but Micky had stalked by without turning his eyes, and after the barest second she followed and touched his arm.
“Micky....” she said breathlessly, and again “Micky,” with an odd little catch in her voice.
Micky turned as if he had been shot, then stopped dead, colouring up to the roots of his hair, for the girl was Marie Deland.