“Garn!” said the old man.  “I smokes terbakker,” and he filled his pipe with shag.

Mr. Finn rose from the table.  “Will you excuse me, Mr. Savelli, if I leave you?  I get up early to attend to my business.  I must be at Billingsgate at half-past five to buy my fish.  Besides, I have been preventing your talk with our friends.  So pray don’t go.  Good-night, Mr. Savelli.”

As he shook hands Paul met the sorrowful liquid eyes fixed on him with strange earnestness.  “I must thank you for your charming hospitality.  I hope you’ll allow me to come and see you again.”

“My house is yours.”

It was a phrase—­a phrase of Castilian politeness—­oddly out of place in the mouth of a Free Zionist purveyor of fried fish.  But it seemed to have more than a Castilian, more than a Free Zionist significance.  He was still pondering over it when Mr. Finn, having bidden Jane and Barney Bill good-night, disappeared.

“Ah!” said Barney Bill, lifting up the beer jug in order to refill his glass, and checked whimsically by the fact of its emptiness.  “Ah,” said he, setting down the jug and limping round the table, “let us hear as how you’ve been getting on, sonny.”

They drew their chairs about the great. hearth, in which the idiotic little Viennese plaster animals sported in movement eternally arrested, and talked of the years that had passed.  Paul explained once more his loss of Jane and his fruitless efforts to find her.

“We didn’t know,” said Jane.  “We thought that either you were dead or had forgotten us—­or had grown too big a man for us.”

“Axing your pardon,” said Barney Bill, taking his blackened clay from his lips and holding it between his gnarled fingers, “you said so.  I didn’t.  I always held that, if he wasn’t dead, the time would come when, as it was to-night, the three of us would be sitting round together.  I maintained,” he added solemnly after a puff or two, “that his heart was in the right place.  I’m a broken-down old crock, no longer a pagan; but I’m right.  Ain’t I, sonny?” He thrust an arm into the ribs of Paul, who was sitting between them.

Paul looked at Jane.  “I think this proves it.”

She returned his look steadily.  “I own I was wrong.  But a woman only proves herself to be right by always insisting that she is wrong.”

“My dear Jane,” cried Paul.  “Since when have you become so psychological?”

“Gorblime,” said Barney Bill, “what in thunder’s that?”

“I know,” said Jane.  “You”—­to Paul—­“were good enough to begin my education.  I’ve tried since to go on with it.”

“It’s nothing to do with edication,” said Barney Bill.  “It’s fac’s.  Let’s have fac’s.  Jane and I have been tramping the same old high-road, but you’ve been climbing mountains—­yer and yer gold cigarette cases.  Let’s hear about it.”

So Paul told his story, and as he told it, it seemed to him, in its improbability, more like a fairy-tale than the sober happenings of real life.