Mosscrop laughed to himself as he ran down the stairs of the hotel. The spirit of mirth remained with him while he more slowly ascended the flight of steps, and the dingy passage and covered by-way leading up to the Strand. It was the most comical thing he had ever heard of, and he chuckled again and again during the climb. But upon the bustling crowded thoroughfare it somehow ceased to seem so funny, or at least its value as a source of entertainment began to diminish rapidly. He found his mind reverting irresistibly to the disappointment of the early morning. The image of Vestalia rose upon his mental vision, and would not go away. He brooded over it as he walked, and recognised that intervening incidents and personalities had in no sense dimmed his interest in it. He pictured her wonderful hair again, her bright-faced smile, her dear little airs and graces, with a yearning emptiness of heart. The luncheon obtainable at the Barbary Club was even more unpalatable than usual, which was saying much. The familiar fact that the waiters were Germans struck him afresh, and took on the proportions of an international grievance. There were some fellows upstairs playing at what they supposed was whist. He stood for a while over the shoulders of a couple of the gamesters, and noted, with a cynical eye, the progress of their hot rivalry as to which should contribute the larger incapacity and the finer stupidity to the losing of the rubber. When they asked him if he wanted to cut in, he turned away with a snort of derisive scorn. Over in the billiard-room there were only the marker and the member who played far worse than anybody else in the club. David sourly consented to occupy himself with this egregious outsider, and was beaten by him. The result was so clearly due to accident that he laid some money on the next game. Again the duffer fluked like mad, and won, and in a third game his luck was of such a glaring character, that Mosscrop could not refrain from loud comment. This his antagonist resented. They parted with harsh words, and Mosscrop, cursing the hour when it first occurred to him to identify himself with such a squalid pot-house, hastened angrily to shake its dust from his feet. He made his way, by devious streets whose old book-stalls for once beckoned him in vain, to Bloomsbury and the Museum. A kind of idea had grown up unobtrusively in the background of his thoughts, that possibly he might find Vestalia there. It assumed the definite outlines of an expectation as soon as he entered the building. When he stood in the reading-room itself, and began a systematic scrutiny of its radiating rows of readers, it was with as much confidence as if he had come by appointment. The failure to discover her disturbed and annoyed him. He made a slow tour of the inner circle, then another of the broader outer ring, and suffered no one of the professed students to escape his examining eye.