And now she was gone, like a snow-flake on a river.  For a long while it seemed absurd, incredible.  He went on all sorts of preposterous adventures to find her.  He walked through the city day after day at the hours when girls and men pour out of their honeycombs of offices into the streets.  She had never told him where she was employed, thinking the matter of little interest; and he, in his careless way, had never inquired.  Once he had suggested calling for her at her office, and she had abruptly vetoed the suggestion.  Paul was too remarkable a young man to escape the notice of her associates; her feelings towards him were too fine to be scratched by jocular allusion.  After a time, having failed to meet her in the human torrents of Cheapside and Cannon Street, Paul gave up the search.  Jane was lost, absolutely lost—­and, with her, Barney Bill.  He went on tour again, heavy-hearted.  He felt that, in losing these two, he had committed an act of base ingratitude.

He had been four years on the stage and had grown from youth into manhood.  But one day at three-and-twenty he found himself as poor in pence, though as rich in dreams, as at thirteen.

Necessity had compelled him to take what he could get.  This time it was a leading part; but a leading part in a crude melodrama in a fit-up company.  They had played in halls and concert rooms, on pier pavilions, in wretched little towns.  It was glorious July Weather and business was bad—­so bad that the manager abruptly closed the treasury and disappeared, leaving the company stranded a hundred and fifty miles from London, with a couple of weeks’ salary unpaid.

Paul was packing his clothes in the portmanteau that lay on the narrow bed in his tiny back bedroom, watched disconsolately by a sallow, careworn man who sat astride the one cane chair, his hat on the back of his head, the discoloured end of a cigarette between his lips.

“It’s all very well for you to take it cheerfully,” said the latter.  “You’re young.  You’re strong.  You’re rich.  You’ve no one but yourself.  You haven’t a wife and kids depending on you.”

“I know it makes a devil of a difference,” replied Paul, disregarding the allusion to his wealth.  As the leading man, he was the most highly paid member of the disastrous company, and he had acquired sufficient worldly wisdom to know that to him who has but a penny the possessor of a shilling appears arrogantly opulent.  “But still,” said he, “what can we do?  We must get back to London and try again.”

“If there was justice in this country that son of a thief would get fifteen years for it.  I never trusted the skunk.  A fortnight’s salary gone and no railway fare to London.  I wish to God I had never taken it on.  I could have gone with Garbutt in The White Woman—­ he’s straight enough—­only this was a joint engagement.  Oh, the swine!”

He rose with a clatter, threw his cigarette on the floor and stamped on it violently.