In the lives of men an inexorable rhythm, caused by the need for trousers, not even the fondest parents can deny.  On the second day, therefore, Jon went to Town, and having satisfied his conscience by ordering what was indispensable in Conduit Street, turned his face toward Piccadilly.  Stratton Street, where her Club was, adjoined Devonshire House.  It would be the merest chance that she should be at her Club.  But he dawdled down Bond Street with a beating heart, noticing the superiority of all other young men to himself.  They wore their clothes with such an air; they had assurance; they were old.  He was suddenly overwhelmed by the conviction that Fleur must have forgotten him.  Absorbed in his own feeling for her all these weeks, he had mislaid that possibility.  The corners of his mouth drooped, his hands felt clammy.  Fleur with the pick of youth at the beck of her smile-Fleur incomparable!  It was an evil moment.  Jon, however, had a great idea that one must be able to face anything.  And he braced himself with that dour refection in front of a bric-a-brac shop.  At this high-water mark of what was once the London season, there was nothing to mark it out from any other except a grey top hat or two, and the sun.  Jon moved on, and turning the corner into Piccadilly, ran into Val Dartie moving toward the Iseeum Club, to which he had just been elected.

“Hallo! young man!  Where are you off to?”

Jon gushed.  “I’ve just been to my tailor’s.”

Val looked him up and down.  “That’s good!  I’m going in here to order some cigarettes; then come and have some lunch.”

Jon thanked him.  He might get news of her from Val!

The condition of England, that nightmare of its Press and Public men, was seen in different perspective within the tobacconist’s which they now entered.

“Yes, sir; precisely the cigarette I used to supply your father with.  Bless me!  Mr. Montague Dartie was a customer here from—­let me see—­the year Melton won the Derby.  One of my very best customers he was.”  A faint smile illumined the tobacconist’s face.  “Many’s the tip he’s given me, to be sure!  I suppose he took a couple of hundred of these every week, year in, year out, and never changed his cigarette.  Very affable gentleman, brought me a lot of custom.  I was sorry he met with that accident.  One misses an old customer like him.”

Val smiled.  His father’s decease had closed an account which had been running longer, probably, than any other; and in a ring of smoke puffed out from that time-honoured cigarette he seemed to see again his father’s face, dark, good-looking, moustachioed, a little puffy, in the only halo it had earned.  His father had his fame here, anyway—­a man who smoked two hundred cigarettes a week, who could give tips, and run accounts for ever!  To his tobacconist a hero!  Even that was some distinction to inherit!

“I pay cash,” he said; “how much?”