“Bravo!  Bravo!” “That’s the trick!”—­“Encore!”—­“Oh, she’s my fancy girl!”—­“Encore-ore-ore-ore-ore!”

It was all over.

CHAPTER X

He hurried back to Bloomsbury, in the wake of her hansom, to the house of the balcony opposite the plane-trees.  The plane-tree was half-withdrawn into the night, but the balcony hung out black in the yellow light from its three long windows.  Poppy was not in the balcony.

He went up into the room where the light was, a room that had been once an ordinary Bloomsbury drawing-room, the drawing-room of Propriety.  Now it was Poppy’s drawing-room.

You came straight out of a desert of dreary and obscure respectability, and it burst, it blossomed into Poppy before your eyes.  Portraits of Poppy on the walls, in every conceivable and inconceivable attitude.  Poppy’s canary in the window, in a cage hung with yellow gauze.  Poppy’s mandoline in an easy chair by itself.  Poppy’s hat on the grand piano, tumbling head over heels among a litter of coffee cups.  On the tea-table a pair of shoes that could have belonged to nobody but Poppy, they were so diminutive.  In the waste paper basket a bouquet that must have been Poppy’s too, it was so enormous.  And on the table in the window a Japanese flower-bowl that served as a handy receptacle for cigarette ash and spent vestas.  Two immense mirrors facing each other reflected these objects and Poppy, when she was there, for ever and ever, in diminishing perspective.  But Poppy was not there.

Passing through this brilliant scene into the back room beyond, he found her finishing her supper.

Poppy was not at all surprised to see him.  She addressed him as “Rickets,” and invited him under that name to sit down and have some supper, too.

But Rickets did not want any supper.  He sat down at the clear end of the table, and looked on as in a dream.  And when Poppy had finished she came and sat by him on the clear end of the table, and made cigarettes, and drank champagne out of a little tumbler.

“Thought you might feel a little lonely over there, Ricky-ticky,” said she.

Poppy was in spirits.  If she had yielded to the glad impulse of her heart, she would have stood on one foot and twirled the other over Ricky-ticky’s head.  But she restrained herself.  Somehow, before Ricky-ticky, Poppy never played any of those tricks that delighted Mr. Pilkington and other gentlemen of her acquaintance.  She merely sat on the table.  She was in her ballet-dress, and before sitting on the table she arranged her red skirts over her black legs with a prodigious air of propriety.  Poppy herself did not know whether this meant that she wanted Ricky-ticky to think her nice, or whether she wanted to think Ricky-ticky nice.  After all, it came to the same thing; for to Poppy the peculiar charm of Ricky-ticky was his innocence.

The clock on St. Pancras church struck half-past eleven; in his hanging cage in the front room, behind his yellow gauze curtain, Poppy’s canary woke out of his first sleep.  He untucked his head from under his wing and chirrupped drowsily.