“Thanks,” said Lewisham shortly, and walked away from him.  The studiously characteristic signature quivered and sprawled in an unfamiliar manner.

“I’m damned if he overrides it,” said Lewisham, under his breath.

CHAPTER XV.

LOVE IN THE STREETS.

Lewisham was not quite clear what course he meant to take in the high enterprise of foiling Lagune, and indeed he was anything but clear about the entire situation.  His logical processes, his emotions and his imagination seemed playing some sort of snatching game with his will.  Enormous things hung imminent, but it worked out to this, that he walked home with Ethel night after night for—­to be exact—­seven-and-sixty nights.  Every week night through November and December, save once, when he had to go into the far East to buy himself an overcoat, he was waiting to walk with her home.  A curious, inconclusive affair, that walk, to which he came nightly full of vague longings, and which ended invariably under an odd shadow of disappointment.  It began outside Lagune’s most punctually at five, and ended—­mysteriously—­at the corner of a side road in Clapham, a road of little yellow houses with sunk basements and tawdry decorations of stone.  Up that road she vanished night after night, into a grey mist and the shadow beyond a feeble yellow gas-lamp, and he would watch her vanish, and then sigh and turn back towards his lodgings.

They talked of this and that, their little superficial ideas about themselves, and of their circumstances and tastes, and always there was something, something that was with them unspoken, unacknowledged, which made all these things unreal and insincere.

Yet out of their talk he began to form vague ideas of the home from which she came.  There was, of course, no servant, and the mother was something meandering, furtive, tearful in the face of troubles.  Sometimes of an afternoon or evening she grew garrulous.  “Mother does talk so—­sometimes.”  She rarely went out of doors.  Chaffery always rose late, and would sometimes go away for days together.  He was mean; he allowed only a weekly twenty-five shillings for housekeeping, and sometimes things grew unsatisfactory at the week-end.  There seemed to be little sympathy between mother and daughter; the widow had been flighty in a dingy fashion, and her marriage with her chief lodger Chaffery had led to unforgettable sayings.  It was to facilitate this marriage that Ethel had been sent to Whortley, so that was counted a mitigated evil.  But these were far-off things, remote and unreal down the long, ill-lit vista of the suburban street which swallowed up Ethel nightly.  The walk, her warmth and light and motion close to him, her clear little voice, and the touch of her hand; that was reality.