t would
be able to see our mouths and noses and eyes. From the front we look
lovely; but close to we're horrors."

"Well, how should I know that?" asked Jane.

"You couldn't unless you saw us--or were told. But now you know."

"Do you look beastly too?"

"Vile," he laughed.

"I'm glad I didn't think of going on the stage,"' she said, childish
yet very feminine unreason combining with atavistic puritanism. "I
shouldn't like to paint my face."

"You get used to it," said Paul, the experienced.

"I think it horrid to paint your face."

He swung to the door--they were in the little parlour behind the
shop--a flash of anger in his eyes. "If you think everything I do
horrid, I can't talk to you."

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 lad