"Bravo! Bravo!" "That's the trick!"--"Encore!"--"Oh, _she's_ my fancy
girl!"--"Encore-ore-ore-ore-ore!"

It was all over.

CHAPTER X

He hurried back to Bloomsbury, in the wake of her hansom, to the house
of the balcony opposite the plane-trees. The plane-tree was
half-withdrawn into the night, but the balcony hung out black in the
yellow light from its three long windows. Poppy was not in the
balcony.

He went up into the room where the light was, a room that had been
once an ordinary Bloomsbury drawing-room, the drawing-room of
Propriety. Now it was Poppy's drawing-room.

You came straight out of a desert of dreary and obscure
respectability, and it burst, it blossomed into Poppy before your
eyes. Portraits of Poppy on the walls, in every conceivable and
inconceivable attitude. Poppy's canary in the window, in a cage hung
with yellow gauze. Poppy's mandoline in an easy chair by itself.
Poppy's hat on the grand piano, tumbling head over heels among a
litter of coffee cups. On the tea-table a pair of shoes that could
have belonged to nobody but Poppy, they were so diminutive. In the
waste paper basket a bouquet that must have been Poppy's too, it was
so enormous. And on the table in the window a Japanese flower-bowl
that served as a handy receptacle for cigarette ash and spent vestas.
Two immense mirrors facing each other reflected these objects and
Poppy, when she was there, for ever and ever, in diminishing
perspective. But Poppy was not there.

Passing through this brilliant scene into the back room beyond, he
found her finishing her supper.

Poppy was not at all surprised to see him. She addressed him as
"Rickets," and invited him under that name to sit down and have some
supper, too.

But Rickets did not want any supper. He sat down at the clear end of
the table, and looked on as in a dream. And when Poppy had finished
she came and sat by him on the clear end of the table, and made
cigarettes, and drank champagne out of a little tumbler.

"Thought you might feel a little lonely over there, Ricky-ticky," said
she.

Poppy was in spirits. If she had yielded to the glad impulse of her
heart, she would have stood on one foot and twirled the other over
Ricky-ticky's head. But she restrained herself. Somehow, before
Ricky-ticky, Poppy never played any of those tricks that delighted Mr.
Pilkington and other gentlemen of her acquaintance. She merely sat on
the table. She was in her ballet-dress, a