By the same post arrived a small parcel:  it contained a ring, a few other bits of jewellery, and all the letters and notes that he had ever written or scribbled to Marguerite.  He did not want the jewellery back; he did not want the letters back.  To receive them somehow humiliated him.  Surely she might have omitted this nauseous conventionality!  She was so exasperatingly conscientious.  Her neat, clerk-like calligraphy, on the label of the parcel, exasperated him.  She had carefully kept every scrap of a missive from him.  He hated to look at the letters.  What could he do with them except rip them up?  And the miserable trinkets—­which she had worn, which had been part of her?  As for him, he had not kept all her letters—­not by any means.  There might be a few, lying about in drawers.  He would have to collect and return them.  Odious job!  And he could not ask anybody else to do it for him.

He was obliged to question Lucas about the Regent Street Prosser’s, of which, regrettably, he had never heard.  He did not, in so many words, request John Orgreave for the favour of an hour off.  He was now out of his articles, though still by the force of inertia at the office, and therefore he informed John Orgreave that unless Mr. John had any objection he proposed to take an hour off.  Mr. Enwright was not in.  Lucas knew vaguely of the rendezvous, having somewhere met Laurencine.

From the outside Prosser’s was not distinguishable from any other part of Regent Street.  But George could not mistake it, because Miss Wheeler’s car was drawn up in front of the establishment, and Lois was waiting for him therein.  Strange procedure!  She smiled and then frowned, and got out sternly.  She said scarcely anything, and he found that he could make only such silly remarks as:  “Hope I’m not late, am I?”

The new Prosser’s was a grandiose by-product of chocolate.  The firm had taken the leading ideas of the chief tea-shop companies catering for the million in hundreds of establishments arranged according to pattern, and elaborated them with what is called in its advertisements ‘cachet.’  Its prices were not as cheap as those of the popular houses, but they could not be called dear.  George and Lois pushed through a crowded lane of chocolate and confectionery, past a staircase which bore a large notice:  “Please keep to the right.”  This notice was needed.  They came at length to the main hall, under a dome, with a gallery between the dome and the ground.  The floor was carpeted.  The multitudinous small tables had cloths, flowers, silver, and menus knotted with red satin ribbon.  The place was full of people, people seated at the tables and people walking about.  Above the rail of the gallery could be seen the hats and heads of more people.  People were entering all the time and leaving all the time.  Scores of waitresses, in pale green and white, moved to and fro like an alien and mercenary population.  The heat, the stir, the hum, and the clatter were terrific.  And from on high descended thin, strident music in a rapid and monotonous rhythm.