It was striking twelve when he got home; he stood for a moment on the doorstep, looking up at the starry sky.
Several clocks were chiming midnight in the distance; he listened with a queer sense of fatalism.
This was the strangest New Year’s Eve he had ever spent in his life. At this hour last year he had been dancing the old year out, and to-night, had things gone as he had thought, he would have been somewhere with Marie Deland––he might even have proposed to her by this time. He smiled faintly, remembering that the intention had really been somewhere in the background of his mind; but that, too, had faded out now to give place to other, more important, factors.
Nine, ten, eleven, twelve! He counted the strokes 24 mechanically; there was a breathless pause, then the clash of bells.
Some irrepressibles in a block of flats near by raised a cheer; the front door of a house opposite was open, and Micky caught a glimpse of a crowded hall and black-coated men and girls in pretty frocks.
He felt strangely removed from all the noise and laughter; after a moment he turned and went up to his room.
The fire had been carefully made up and his slippers and dressing-gown put to warm. Micky looked at them with a sort of disgust; it was sickening for a healthy grown man to be so pampered; he kicked the slippers into a corner and tossed the dressing-gown on to the couch.
He wondered what sort of a room Esther Shepstone had in the very horrid boarding-house––what odd corner the thin black cat curled into to sleep.
He took Ashton’s letter from his pocket and stuck it up against the clock on the mantelshelf.
“Miss Esther Shepstone....”