And he, Robert Stonehouse, stood outside the circle, as in reality he had always done.  But now he did not want to belong.  He knew now how it hindered men to run with the herd—­even to have friends.  It wasted time and strength.  And these people were no good anyhow.  Howard was one of these dissipated duffers who later on would settle down as a miraculously respectable and incapable G.P.  The rest were vague, rattle-brained eccentrics who would fizzle out, no one would know how or care.

Only Francey——­ But even in the old days it was only because of Francey that the Banditti had meant anything to him.

The head waiter pushed across the counter a jug of yellowish liquid in which floated orange peel and a few tinned, dubious-looking cherries.

“Take it, for God’s sake!  People who want muck like that ought to keep to Soho.”

Robert poured out with an eye trained to accurate measurements in the laboratory.  It was his practice to do well everything that he had to do.  Otherwise you lost tone—­you weakened your own fibre so that when the big thing came along you slumped.  But he could not forget Francey Wilmot’s nearness.  It did not surprise him any more.  But it charged him with unrest, and he and his unrest frightened him.  He knew how to master ordinary emotion.  Even when he carried off the Franklin Scholarship in the teeth of a brilliant opposition he had not allowed himself a moment’s triumph.  It was all in the day’s work—­a single step on the road which he had mapped out deliberately.  But this was outside his experience.  It had pounced on him from nowhere, shaking him.

He had to look up at her again.  And then he saw that she was looking at him too, steadily, with a deep, inquiring kindness.

It was as though she had said aloud: 

“Are you really a good little boy, Robert?”

The cider poured over the edge of the glass and over the table-cloth and in a dismal stream on to the lap of the girl with the raffish billycock hat.

“Well, that settles that,” she said good-humouredly.  “My only skirt, friends.  She can’t turn me out in my petticoat, can she?  Oh, leave it alone, garcong; it doesn’t matter a tinker’s curse——­”

He could not help it.  In the midst of his angry confusion he still had to seek out her verdict on him—­just as Robert Stonehouse had always done when he had been peculiarly heroic or unfortunate.  And there it was, dancing beneath her gravity, her unforgotten, magic laughter.

At half-past ten Brown’s cleared its last table.  Robert Stonehouse rolled down his sleeves, picked up the parcel which had been placed ready for him on the pantry counter, said good-night to the head waiter, who did not answer, and with his coat-collar turned up about his ears went out in the street.  It was quiet as a country lane and empty except for the girl who waited beyond the lamp light.  He knew her instantly, and in turn two sensations that were equally foreign and unfamiliar seized him.  The first was sheer panic, and the second was a sense of inevitability.  The second was the oddest of the two, because he did not believe in Fate, but he did believe in his own will.