ust like Marsden to be late, for all that.

At first Romarin did not recognise him when he turned the corner of the
street and walked towards him. He hadn't made up his mind beforehand
exactly how he had expected Marsden to look, but he was conscious that he
didn't look it. It was not the short stubble of grey beard, so short that
it seemed to hesitate between beard and unshavenness; it was not the
figure nor carriage--clothes alter that, and the clothes of the man who
was advancing to meet Romarin were, to put it bluntly, shabby; nor was
it... but Romarin did not know what it was in the advancing figure that
for the moment found no response in his memory. He was already within
half a dozen yards of the men who were moving the scenery from the
theatre into the tumbril, and one of the workmen put up his hand as the
edge of a fresh "wing" appeared....

But at the sound of his voice the same thing happened that had happened
when the clock had struck seven. Romarin found himself suddenly
expectant, attentive, and then again curiously satisfied in his memory.
Marsden's voice at least had not changed; it was as in the old days--a
little envious, sarcastic, accepting lower interpretations somewhat
willingly, somewhat grudging of better ones. It completed the taking back
of Romarin that the chiming of the clock, the doorknocker, the grouping
of the chimney-stack and the crack in the flagstone had begun.

"Well, my distinguished Academician, my--"

Marsden's voice sounded across the group of scene-shifters...

"_'Alf_ a mo, _if_ you please, guv'nor," said another voice...

For a moment the painted "wing" shut them off from one another.

* * * * *

In that moment Romarin's accident befell him. If its essential nature is
related in arbitrary terms, it is that there are no other terms to relate
it in. It is a decoded cipher, which can be restored to its cryptic form
as Romarin subsequently restored it.

* * * * *

As the painter took Marsden's arm and entered the restaurant, he noticed
that while the outside of the place still retained traces of the old, its
inside was entirely new. Its cheap glittering wall-mirrors, that gave a
false impression of the actual size of the place, its Loves and
Shepherdesses painted in the style of the carts of the vendors of
ice-cream, its hat-racks and its four-bladed propeller that set the air
slowly in motion at the farther en