At the railway station the next afternoon he found most of the company already assembled on the platform. Curious glances were cast upon him as he appeared; there were nudgings and whisperings; some giggling on the part of the chorus girls standing round Annie Stevens, who was looking paler and more defiant than usual. A group of his colleagues melted away at his approach. He saw at once what had happened. The fears that had haunted him all the night and all that day were realised. He felt his face and lips grow white, and his limbs trembled. With an instinctive remnant of self-assertion, he went up to Blake, who was standing by one of the reserved carriages. It seemed a long time before he could speak. At last he asked him stupidly at what time the train started.

“Four-forty,” said Blake, curtly.

“And when do we get to Leeds?”

“How the devil should I know? If you want to know, there’s the guard. Ask him.”

With which he moved away and joined two or three others a few steps off. Joyce felt too sick with misery to resent the rudeness. He walked a short distance along the train, and seeing one of his colleagues in a compartment, concluded that it was reserved for the chorus-men and crept into the far corner, where he sat down, holding a newspaper before his face.

The compartment filled and the train started. At first there was a general constraint in the talk. Then a game at nap was instituted; but no one spoke to Joyce. At Selby there was over an hour’s wait. With a feeling that he must be alone at any cost, he rushed out of the station, and, avoiding the town, wandered aimlessly through lanes and fields until it was time to return. He was too dazed and overwhelmed by this sudden blow to think coherently. Now it was the girl’s deliberate cruelty that passed his comprehension; now the sickening shame at being known in his true colours to a whole society burned into his flesh. Only one thought stood out from the rest in lurid clearness—the impossibility of his continuing the tour. Even if the management took no notice of the discovery, he felt he would rather starve to death in a hole than live through that hell of daily aversion and contempt. To return to the company and travel with them as far as Leeds was pain enough. He would face that, however, and then—

It was gathering dusk when he arrived at the station, just in time to see the guard about to wave the green flag. The handle of the compartment was in his grasp when he heard McKay say:—

“Well, because a fellow’s happened to be in quod, that doesn’t mean he’s likely to sneak your watches out of the dressing-room!”

He opened the door and entered amid a dead silence, which lasted, with few interruptions, all the rest of the journey. Joyce looked round at his seven companions, with an awful sense of isolation. Only four-and-twenty hours before he had loved them for their warm good-fellowship. He was wrung with the pity of it. McKay’s words still sounded in his ear. They were horrible enough, but it was evident they were meant in his defence. Once he met his glance, and read in it a signal of kind intent. But the others steadily looked another way when his eye fell upon them.

When they left the train at Leeds, McKay touched him on the shoulder and drew him apart from the hurrying stream of passengers and porters.

“What’s all this yarn that Annie Stevens has been telling us?”

“Oh, it’s true enough,” replied Joyce, wearily.

“The damned little hell-cat,” said McKay. “I told you to keep clear of women.”

“It was bound to come out. One of you fellows might just as well have been with me in the pub last night.”

“Do you think a man would have given you away like this?” asked McKay, with great scorn.

“I ’ve come to the conclusion that anything’s possible in this infernal world,” said Joyce, bitterly. “I suppose the whole crowd are against me.”

“Well, there is a bit of feeling, certainly,” replied McKay, in an embarrassed tone. “And maybe it won’t be very pleasant for you. They all talk as if they were plaster of Paris saints,—and, dash it all—they made me sick; so I thought I’d come and say I’d stand by you.”

“Thank you, McKay,” said Joyce, touched. “You are a good sort. But I sha’n’t ask you. I am not going on with the tour.”

“I think you’re just as well out of it, to tell you the truth,” said McKay. Then his anger against Annie Stevens broke out again in an unequivocal epithet.

“The little————,” he said.

“I suppose it is horrible in a woman’s eyes,” said Joyce, moving with McKay toward the crowd round the luggage-van. “But I can’t see why she should hate me like this, all of a sudden, and wish to ruin me.”

“Can’t you? It’s pretty plain.”

“No,” said Joyce. “We have always been the best of friends.”

“Friends? You don’t mean to say you did n’t know she was gone on you—clean gone, all off her chump? No one liked to chaff you about it, because you have an infernal sarcastic way of scoring off fellows. But, Gawd! The way she used to look at you was enough to make a man sick!”

“Do you mean she was in love with me?” asked Joyce, falteringly, as the whole situation of affairs, past and present, began to dawn upon him.

“Well, rather,” said McKay, with a chuckle. “What do you think?”

Several of the company were still around the pile of luggage by the van, claiming their things and waiting for porters. Standing on one side was Annie Stevens, and, as it happened, Joyce recognised his Gladstone bag lying at her feet He went and picked it up, and was going off silently with it, when he felt her touch on his arm. Dim as the light was, he could see that her face was haggard and drawn. She met his stern gaze beseechingly.

“For God’s sake, forgive me,” she whispered.

“You have played too much havoc with my life,” replied Joyce coldly.

“I shall kill myself,” said the girl.

“Some people are better dead,” said Joyce, turning away, bag in hand.

On the platform beyond the barriers he met McKay again.

“Good-bye, McKay,” he said. “I have only two friends in the world who know my story, and you are one.”

“Good-bye, old man,” said McKay. “Better luck next time.”

They shook hands and parted, McKay to join his friend Blake at the lodgings they had secured already, Joyce to put up for the night at the first cheap hotel he could find.

The next day he was in London again, in his old room in Pimlico—a broken-hearted, broken-spirited man. For two days he remained in a state of stupid misery, yearning for the life he had just abandoned; tortured, too, by reproaches for his cowardice. Why had he not faced the ignominy, and tried to live it down? Then the conviction of the hopelessness of the attempt was forced upon him. Even if he had continued in the profession, his name would soon have been known throughout it as the ex-convict,—and he had been in it long enough to perceive how narrow the theatrical circle is,—and all hope of advancement would have been worse than futile. On the third day he went to see Yvonne, but she had just gone out of town. The porter at the flat did not know how long she would be away. She was at Fulminster. Her letters were forwarded there. So Joyce wrote her a short note, explaining his situation, and set himself to wait patiently for her coming.

But on that evening, out of sheer weariness and longing for human companionship, he turned into his old haunt, the billiard-room in Westminster. It seemed just the same as on the last evening he had been there. The occupants of the divan might never have moved from that night to this. His appearance was greeted with incurious, uninterested nods. The only one that offered his hand was Noakes, who was sitting at the end, still in his Chesterfield overcoat and old curly silk hat, but looking more woe-begone and pallid than ever. There was a touch of pain, too, in his usually expressionless pale-blue eyes. Joyce took his seat next to him and bent forward, elbows on knees and chin resting in his hands.

“You have been absent from town?” asked Noakes, in his precise, toneless way.

Joyce nodded, with a murmur of assent.

“I, too, have not been here lately.”

“Press of literary work?” asked Joyce, without looking up.

The other did not notice the shade of sarcasm. He passed his hand across his eyes and sighed.

“I have given it up.”

“Have you come into a fortune?”

“No. I have had the deadliest misfortune that can befall a man.”

Something genuinely tragic in his tone made Joyce start up from his dejected attitude and look at his neighbour.

“I beg your pardon,” he said. “I did not know.”

“Of course not; no one does. At least, no one I can repose any confidence in.”

There was an air of dignity in this oddly attired figure, with the ludicrous silk hat above the black mutton-chop whiskers and bushy white hair, and yet a mute appeal for sympathy which Joyce could not but perceive.

“I, too, have been hard hit lately,” he said, in a low voice.

“Ah, not like me,” said the other, turning round in his seat, so that his words should reach only Joyce’s ear. “Until three weeks ago I had a wife and child. No man ever loved as I did. I worked for them till my brain almost gave way—fifteen hours a day, week after week, starved myself for them, denied myself the clothes on my back. Now I have them no longer. Life is valueless to me.”

“Are they—dead?” asked Joyce.

“No. Gone off with the lodger on the first floor,” replied Noakes, solemnly.

Joyce remained silent. What could he say? He looked sympathetic. Noakes blew his nose in a dirty piece of calico with frayed edges that courtesy called a pocket-handkerchief, and continued:—

“So my life is wrecked. My imagination is darkened and I can write no more. I have given up my literary ambitions. It is not worth while writing penny bloods at half a crown a thousand for one’s own support.”

“What are you going to do then?” asked Joyce, interested in the quaint creature.

“I am going abroad. I have come here perhaps for the last time. On the day after to-morrow I sail for South Africa.”

Was it a sudden inspiration? Was it the coming to a head of vague resolutions, despairs, workings, the final word of a destiny driving him from England? Was it a sudden sense of protecting brotherhood towards this forlorn, tragic scarecrow of a man? Joyce never knew. Possibly it was all bursting upon his soul at once. Springing to his feet, he held out his hand to Noakes.

“By all that’s holy, I ’ll come with you!” he cried, in a strange voice.

The other, after some hesitation, took his hand and looked at him pathetically.

“Are you in earnest?”

“In dead earnest.”

“I am going in the very cheapest possible manner.”

“So am I.”

“I am going, with a few pounds I have scraped together, to try my luck.”

“The same with me. It can’t be worse than England; starvation is certain here. Come, say, honour bright—will you be glad of me as a companion—as a friend if you like? I am a lonely bit of driftwood like yourself.”

Then Noakes rose to his feet and this time squeezed Joyce’s hand and his pale eyes glistened.

“I ’ll swear to be your friend in peace and in danger,” he said, in his quaint phraseology. “And I thank the God of all mercies for sending you to me in my hour of need.”

“All right,” said Joyce. “And now let us have some whisky, and talk over details.”

And so, in that dingy billiard-room, unknown to the moulting Bohemians huddled up in somnolent attitudes close by on the divan and unheeded by the shirt-sleeved men passing around the table intent on their game, was struck the strangest bargain of a friendship ever made between two outcast men; a friendship that was to last through want and sickness and despair and hope, and to leave behind it the ineffaceable stamp of nobler feeling.

But at first there was much admixture of cynicism on Joyce’s side. He laughed aloud, in the bitterness of his heart, at the object he had taken for his bosom friend. It was only later, when he learned the patient, dog-like devotion of the man, that he felt humbled and ashamed at these beginnings.

With a draft on a Cape Town bank for the remainder of his capital, and a last regretful letter from Yvonne in his pocket, he left Southampton. And as they steamed down Channel, in the mizzling rain of a grey November day, he leaned over the taffrail and stared at the land of his brilliant hopes, his crime, his punishment, his struggles and his dishonour, with a man’s agony of unshed tears.

He was going to begin life anew in a strange undesired country; hopeless, aimless, friendless save for that useless creature who was pacing up and down the deck behind him, still in his ridiculous headgear. He had made no plans. The future to him when he should land at Cape Town was as unknown—as it is to any of the sons of men, did we but realise it.