Though it was after three in the morning when Joan got home, she wasn't, as she had thought to be, the only waking person in the house. She had no sooner entered than, fagged though she was, she grasped this knowledge with a thrilling heart. Beneath the door of the back-parlour a thin yellow line of light shone, as brilliant in the obscurity as the rim of a newly minted coin. She paused; and there came to her ears the swift staccato chattering of a typewriter. Of a sudden she remembered how long it was since John Matthias had been anything but an abstraction in the background of her consciousness. He might have been at home for days: she had neither known nor thought of him, so wrapped up had she been with the routine of her work and the formless intrigue of emotions stimulated by the personality of Charlie Quard. But now Charlie had eliminated himself from her life (she was quite sure that she would never see him again) while to the man labouring late, behind that closed door, she must be even more a dim reminiscence than ever before. It stung her pride to think that Matthias had been able to forget her so easily. And she regretted bitterly that she herself had been so ready to let the image of her absent-minded benefactor fade upon the tablets of her memory. By way of mute apology and recompense she hastened to enshrine anew in her heart her ideal of a gentleman; and it was fashioned in the likeness of John Matthias. And she resolved not to let another day pass without approaching him. She was sure he would help her if he could; and she was very anxious to make him realize her again. But morning found her in quite another humour, one as diffident as different. And promptly she made a discovery so infinitely dismaying that it put the man altogether out of her mind for the time being. The Deans, she learned, had on the previous day received an offer for an engagement at a summer park in the Middle West, and had accepted, packed up and departed, all in an afternoon. So she was more lonely than ever she had been since leaving home. The bedroom of the Dancing Deans, that salon where those stars of remote and lowly constellations had assembled to afford Joan her only glimpses of social life, was empty, swept and garnished. Those whom she had met there, and who had been nice to her, those scatter-brained, kind-hearted, shiftless denizens of the vaudeville half-world, were once again removed from her reach.