Dickie’s fingers slid into his pocket.  The moon had reminded him of his one remaining dime.  He might have bought a night’s lodging with it, but after one experience of such lodgings he preferred his present quarters.  In Dickie’s mind there was no association of shame or ignominy with a night spent under the sky.  But fear and ignominy tainted and clung to his memory of that other night.  He had saved his dime deliberately, going hungry rather than admit to himself that he was absolutely at the end of his resources.  To-morrow he would not especially need that dime.  He had a job.  He would begin to draw pay.  In his own phrasing he would “buy him a square meal and rent him a room somewhere.”  Upon these two prospects his brain fastened with a leech-like persistency.  And yet above anything he had faced in his life he dreaded the job and the room.  The inspiration of his flight, the impulse that had sped him out of Millings like a fire-tipped arrow, that determination to find Sheila, to rehabilitate himself in her esteem, to serve her, to make a fresh start, had fallen from him like a dead flame.  The arrow-flight was spent.  He had not found Sheila.  He had no way of finding her.  She was not at her old address.  Her father’s friend, the Mr. Hazeldean that had brought Sylvester to Marcus’s studio, knew nothing of her.  Mrs. Halligan, her former landlady, knew nothing of her.  Dickie, having summoned Mrs. Halligan to her doorsill, had looked past her up the narrow, steep staircase.  “Did she live away up there?” he had asked.  “Yes, sorr.  And ’t was a climb for the poor little crayture, but there was days when she’d come down it like a burrd to meet her Pa.”  Dickie had faltered, white and empty-hearted, before the kindly Irishwoman who remembered so vividly Sheila’s downward, winged rush of welcome.  For several hours after his visit to the studio building he had wandered aimlessly about, then his hunger had bitten at him and he had begun to look for work.  It was not difficult to find.  A small restaurant displayed a need of waiters.  Dickie applied.  He had often “helped out” in that capacity, as in most others, at The Aura.  He cited his experience, referred to Mr. Hazeldean, and was engaged.  The pay seemed to him sufficient to maintain life.  So much for that!  Then he went to his bench and watched the day pant itself into the night.  His loneliness was a pitiful thing; his utter lack of hope or inspiration was a terrible thing.

But as the night went slowly by, he faced this desolation with extraordinary fortitude.  It was part of that curious detachment, that strange gift of impersonal observation.  Dickie bore no grudges against life.  His spirit had a fashion of standing away, tiptoe, on wings.  It stood so now like a presence above the miserable, half-starved body that occupied the bench and suffered the sultriness of August and the pains of abstinence.  Dickie’s wide eyes, that watched the city and found it horrible and beautiful and frightening, were entirely empty of bitterness and of self-pity.  They had a sort of wistful patience.