He marched out. Jane suddenly realized that she had behaved badly. She whipped herself. She had behaved atrociously. Of course she had been jealous of the theatre girls; but had he not been proving to her all the time in what small account he held them? And now he had gone. At seventeen a beloved gone for an hour is a beloved gone for ever. She rushed to the foot of the stairs on which his ascending steps still creaked. "Paul!" "Yes." "Come back! Do come back!" Paul came back and followed her into the parlour. "I'm sorry," she said. He graciously forgave her, having already arrived at the mature conclusion that females were unaccountable folk whose excursions into unreason should be regarded by man with pitying indulgence. And, in spite of the seriousness with which he took himself, he was a sunny-tempered youth. Barney Bill, putting into the Port of London, so to speak, in order to take in cargo, also visited the theatre towards the end of the run of the piece. He waited, by arrangement, for Paul outside the stage door, and Paul, coming out, linked arms and took him to a blazing bar in Piccadilly Circus and ministered to his thirst, with a princely air. "It seems rum," said Bill, wiping his lips with the back of his hand, after a mighty pull at the pint tankard--"it seems rum that you should be standing me drinks at a swell place like this. It seems only yesterday that you was a two-penn'orth of nothing jogging along o' me in the old 'bus." "I've moved a bit since then, haven't I?" said Paul. "You have, sonny," said Barney Bill. "But"--he sighed and looked around the noisy glittering place, at the smart barmaids, the well-clad throng of loungers, some in evening dress, the half-dozen gorgeous ladies sitting with men at little tables by the window--"I thinks as how you gets more real happiness in a quiet village pub, and the beer is cheaper, and--gorblimey!" He ran his finger between his stringy neck and the frayed stand-up collar that would have sawn his head off but for the toughness of his hide. To do Paul honour he had arrayed himself in his best--a wondrously cut and heavily-braided morning coat and lavender-coloured trousers of eccentric shape, and a funny little billycock hat too small for him, and a thunder-and-lightning necktie, all of which he had purchased nearly twenty years ago to grace a certain wedding at which he had been best man. Since then he had worn the Nessus shirt of a costume not more than half-a-dozen times. The twisted, bright-eyed little man, so obviously ill at ease in his amazing garb, and the beautiful youth, debonair in his well-fitting blue serge, formed a queer contrast. "Don't you never long for the wind of God and the smell of the rain?" asked Barney Bill. "I haven't the time," said Paul. "I'm busy all day long."