He tried to find out whether he had spoken aloud by addressing her pleasantly.  “It’s pretty cold this morning.”

“What say?”

“Pretty cool.”

“Oh yes.  But it’s pretty clo-ose,” she replied, in her Yankee cantillation.  She went away and left him to the bacon and eggs he had ordered at random.  There was a fly under one of the slices of bacon, and Mavering confined himself to the coffee.

A man came up in a white cap and jacket from a basement in the front of the restaurant, where confectionery was sold, and threw down a mass of malleable candy on a marble slab, and began to work it.  Mavering watched him, thinking fuzzily all the time of Alice, and holding long, fatiguing dialogues with the people at the Ty’n-y-Coed, whose several voices he heard.

He said to himself that it was worse than yesterday.  He wondered if it would go on getting worse every day.

He saw a man pass the door of the restaurant who looked exactly like Boardman as he glanced in.  The resemblance was explained by the man’s coming back, and proving to be really Boardman.

XXII.

Mavering sprang at him with a demand for the reason of his being there.

“I thought it was you as I passed,” said Boardman, “but I couldn’t make sure—­so dark back here.”

“And I thought it was you, but I couldn’t believe it,” said Mavering, with equal force, cutting short an interior conversation with Mr. Pasmer, which had begun to hold itself since his first glimpse of Boardman.

“I came down here to do a sort of one-horse yacht race to-day,” Boardman explained.

“Going to be a yacht race?  Better have some breakfast.  Or better not—­here.  Flies under your bacon.”

“Rough on the flies,” said Boardman, snapping the bell which summoned the spectre in the black jersey, and he sat down.  “What are you doing in Portland?”

Mavering told him, and then Boardman asked him how he had left the Pasmers.  Mavering needed no other hint to speak, and he spoke fully, while Boardman listened with an agreeable silence, letting the hero of the tale break into self-scornful groans and doleful laughs, and ease his heart with grotesque, inarticulate noises, and made little or no comments.

By the time his breakfast came, Boardman was ready to say, “I didn’t suppose it was so much of a mash.”

“I didn’t either,” said Mavering, “when I left Boston.  Of course I knew I was going down there to see her, but when I got there it kept going on, just like anything else, up to the last moment.  I didn’t realise till it came to the worst that I had become a mere pulp.”

“Well, you won’t stay so,” said Boardman, making the first vain attempt at consolation.  He lifted the steak he had ordered, and peered beneath it.  All right this time, any way.”

“I don’t know what you mean by staying so,” replied Mavering, with gloomy rejection of the comfort offered.