“If it ain’t Mart!” he heard some one say, and the next moment a hearty hand was on his shoulder.  “Where you ben all the time?  Off to sea?  Come on an’ have a drink.”

It was the old crowd in which he found himself—­the old crowd, with here and there a gap, and here and there a new face.  The fellows were not bricklayers, but, as in the old days, they attended all Sunday picnics for the dancing, and the fighting, and the fun.  Martin drank with them, and began to feel really human once more.  He was a fool to have ever left them, he thought; and he was very certain that his sum of happiness would have been greater had he remained with them and let alone the books and the people who sat in the high places.  Yet the beer seemed not so good as of yore.  It didn’t taste as it used to taste.  Brissenden had spoiled him for steam beer, he concluded, and wondered if, after all, the books had spoiled him for companionship with these friends of his youth.  He resolved that he would not be so spoiled, and he went on to the dancing pavilion.  Jimmy, the plumber, he met there, in the company of a tall, blond girl who promptly forsook him for Martin.

“Gee, it’s like old times,” Jimmy explained to the gang that gave him the laugh as Martin and the blonde whirled away in a waltz.  “An’ I don’t give a rap.  I’m too damned glad to see ’m back.  Watch ’m waltz, eh?  It’s like silk.  Who’d blame any girl?”

But Martin restored the blonde to Jimmy, and the three of them, with half a dozen friends, watched the revolving couples and laughed and joked with one another.  Everybody was glad to see Martin back.  No book of his been published; he carried no fictitious value in their eyes.  They liked him for himself.  He felt like a prince returned from excile, and his lonely heart burgeoned in the geniality in which it bathed.  He made a mad day of it, and was at his best.  Also, he had money in his pockets, and, as in the old days when he returned from sea with a pay-day, he made the money fly.

Once, on the dancing-floor, he saw Lizzie Connolly go by in the arms of a young workingman; and, later, when he made the round of the pavilion, he came upon her sitting by a refreshment table.  Surprise and greetings over, he led her away into the grounds, where they could talk without shouting down the music.  From the instant he spoke to her, she was his.  He knew it.  She showed it in the proud humility of her eyes, in every caressing movement of her proudly carried body, and in the way she hung upon his speech.  She was not the young girl as he had known her.  She was a woman, now, and Martin noted that her wild, defiant beauty had improved, losing none of its wildness, while the defiance and the fire seemed more in control.  “A beauty, a perfect beauty,” he murmured admiringly under his breath.  And he knew she was his, that all he had to do was to say “Come,” and she would go with him over the world wherever he led.