Mr. Yelverton meanwhile paced a few steps to and fro on the footpath outside the gate, looking at his watch frequently. Paul Brion was at home, listening to his father's account of the afternoon's events and the news of the imminent marriage, with moody brow and heavy heart; it was the end of the romance for _him_, he felt, and he was realising what a stale and flat residuum remained in his cup of life. He had seen Mr. Yelverton go to No. 6 with fierce resentment of the liberty that the fortunate lover permitted himself to take with those sacred rights of single womanhood which he, Paul, had been so scrupulous to observe; now he watched the tall man pacing to and fro in the street below, waiting for his bride, with a sense of the inequalities of fortune that made him almost bloodthirsty. He saw the portmanteau set on end by the cabdriver's seat; he saw Elizabeth come forth with a bag in one hand and an umbrella in the other, followed by the servant with an ulster and a bonnet-box. He watched the dispossessed master of Yelverton, who, after all, had lost nothing, and had gained so much, and the great heiress who was to know Myrtle Street and obscurity no more, as they took their seats in the vehicle, she handed in by him with such tender and yet masterful care. He had an impulse to go out upon the balcony to bid her good-bye and God-speed, but he checked it proudly; and, surveying her departure from the window of his sitting-room, convinced himself that she was too much taken up with her own happiness to so much as remember his existence. It was the closing scene of the Myrtle Street drama--the last chapter of the charming little homely story which had been the romance of his life. No more would he see the girls going in and out of the gate of No. 7, nor meet them in the gardens and the street, nor be privileged to offer them his assistance and advice. No more would he sit on his balcony of nights to listen to Beethoven sonatas and Schubert serenades. The sponge had been passed over all those pleasant things, and had wiped them out as if they had never been. There were no longer any Miss Kings. And for Paul there was no longer anything left in life but arid and flavourless newspaper work--the ceaseless grinding of his brains in the great mill of the Press, which gave to the world its daily bread of wisdom, but had no guerdon for the producers of that invaluable grist.