That contrary, cross-grained Drumpipes had predicted that the whole thing would seem ridiculous to him in the morning. He affirmed to himself with fervour that it seemed more charming than ever as he went out into the passage, and knocked on the opposite door. There seemed to be no answering sound, and he struck the panel more sharply, with his ear lowered to the keyhole. Still no response came. “I am going to Covent Garden for a few minutes,” he called through the keyhole; “shall I find you ready to help me when I get back?” Since this, too, brought no reply, he took out his duplicate key and cautiously opened the door. The question, repeated in a much louder tone, died away in profound silence. The glass eyes of a moose on the wall opposite stared at him with an uncomfortable fixity. The bedroom door was ajar, and David was emboldened to stride forward and beat smartly on it with his fist. Again he did this, and then, while a strange excitement welled upward within him--or was it a sinking movement instead?--flung the door open and looked in. There was no Vestalia here at all! The details that the bed was neatly made up, that the room showed no trace of recent occupancy, and that the dressing-bag was gone, soaked themselves vaguely through his mind. He looked about, both in this and the outer apartment, for a message of some kind, quite in vain. His pained attention wandered again in haphazard fashion to the head of the moose, fastened between two windows. The fatuous emptiness of its point-blank gaze suddenly infuriated him, and he dealt its foolishly elongated snout a resounding whack with his open hand. The huge trophy toppled under the blow, swung half-loose on its fastening, then pitched with a crash to the floor. Mosscrop kicked it violently again and again where it lay. CHAPTER VIL Mosscrop had not the heart to breakfast alone in his deserted lodgings. The impulse to get away mastered him on the instant of its appearance. He strode forth as if delay were fraught with sore perils. At a shabby luncheon-bar in the Strand below he consumed a cup of abominable coffee and a dry sausage-roll in the same nervous haste. The barmaid in attendance was known to him. She annoyed him now by displaying in her manner the assumption that he wished to laugh and joke with her as usual. He glowered at her instead, and met her advances to conversation with a curt nod. “You must have got out of the wrong side of the bed this morning,” she commented loftily. “Very likely,” he answered with cold brevity, counting out the necessary coppers and turning on his heel.