The garden was stripped now; the box that had formed the ottoman was naked and broken; the whole place a wilderness. Yet, as she stood in it for a moment, she seemed to see it as it had been, and as it never would be again; looked with eyes that were bright with tears at the familiar shabby place.
"Good-bye—old garden!" she whispered. "You did your best for me—but you never had a real chance. Yet I have loved you as I shall never love any other place, however beautiful; because everything that was good and kind has happened to me here. Good-bye; I hope someone may love you half as well as I have done!"
So at last she fluttered out of the house, and into the cab, with a kindly word or two for those that pressed about her; and quite naturally, as it seemed, told the man to stop at the corner—at the Arcadia Arms. Someone raised a feeble cheer; and one man, beating time, amazingly started—"For he's a jolly good fellow"; then the cab rolled away, with the younger part of Arcadia Street trailing after it.
Outside the Arcadia Arms it waited, with the girl sitting quietly inside. It having been impressed upon Mr. Daniel Meggison inside that he was wanted, and that the time had come for farewells, he was presently prevailed upon to emerge. He appeared surrounded by friends, with a new silk hat, that had been rubbed in places the wrong way, upon the back of his head, and a large cigar with the band upon it in a corner of his mouth, and a little uncertain as to what to do with his legs. He shook hands with all and sundry, and murmured that he would never forget them; was helped into the cab by a dozen willing hands; and left to Arcadia Street the lasting remembrance that they had seen him, as the cab drove away, burst into tears.
Arcadia Street, having been shaken to its depths, spent what was left of the day in discussing the matter, and in talking about the Meggisons in general, and Mr. Daniel Meggison in particular. And quite late at night there were little knots of people gathered outside the empty house, still talking of the glory that had fallen upon those who had departed from it.
CHAPTER VIII
THE PRINCE CUTS THE KNOT
A DULL week in that civilization to which he obstinately refused to be accustomed brought Gilbert Byfield back again—naturally, as it seemed—to Arcadia Street. It had been a week spent practically between three points of a compass which represented Enid and her mother—the club—and his rooms. A fourth point, of a smaller sort, was represented by Mr. Jordan Tant, who hovered about him anxiously, and wondered without disguise why the man had ever come back at all.
Jordan Tant had made one or two remarks concerning the strange little shabby girl of Arcadia Street, but had found, something to his annoyance, that Gilbert appeared to take no interest whatever in that matter, and was quite indifferent to anything that might be said concerning it. Tant groaned in spirit at the thought that after all Gilbert had returned to the ways of the world to which he belonged, and that in due course Mr. Tant would be an interested spectator at some such place as St. George's, Hanover Square, what time Gilbert Byfield held the willing Enid by the hand.