Sir Nigel’s horse being brought, he went on the way which was his.

“It was a mistake to say what I did,” he said before going.  “I ought to have held my tongue.  But I am under the same roof with her.  At any rate, that is a privilege no other man shares with me.”

He rode off smartly, his horse’s hoofs splashing in the rain pools left in the avenue after the storm.  He was not so sure after all that he had made a mistake, and for the moment he was not in the mood to care whether he had made one or not.  His agreeable smile showed itself as he thought of the obstinate, proud brute he had left behind, sitting alone among his shut doors and closed corridors.  They had not shaken hands either at meeting or parting.  Queer thing it was—­the kind of enmity a man could feel for another when he was upset by a woman.  It was amusing enough that it should be she who was upsetting him after all these years—­impudent little Betty, with the ferocious manner.

CHAPTER XXXVIII

AT SHANDY’S

On a late-summer evening in New York the atmosphere surrounding a certain corner table at Shandy’s cheap restaurant in Fourteenth Street was stirred by a sense of excitement.

The corner table in question was the favourite meeting place of a group of young men of the G. Selden type, who usually took possession of it at dinner time—­having decided that Shandy’s supplied more decent food for fifty cents, or even for twenty-five, than was to be found at other places of its order.  Shandy’s was “about all right,” they said to each other, and patronised it accordingly, three or four of them generally dining together, with a friendly and adroit manipulation of “portions” and “half portions” which enabled them to add variety to their bill of fare.

The street outside was lighted, the tide of passers-by was less full and more leisurely in its movements than it was during the seething, working hours of daylight, but the electric cars swung past each other with whiz and clang of bell almost unceasingly, their sound being swelled, at short intervals, by the roar and rumbling rattle of the trains dashing by on the elevated railroad.  This, however, to the frequenters of Shandy’s, was the usual accompaniment of every-day New York life and was regarded as a rather cheerful sort of thing.

This evening the four claimants of the favourite corner table had met together earlier than usual.  Jem Belter, who “hammered” a typewriter at Schwab’s Brewery, Tom Wetherbee, who was “in a downtown office,” Bert Johnson, who was “out for the Delkoff,” and Nick Baumgarten, who having for some time “beaten” certain streets as assistant salesman for the same illustrious machine, had been recently elevated to a “territory” of his own, and was therefore in high spirits.

“Say!” he said.  “Let’s give him a fine dinner.  We can make it between us.  Beefsteak and mushrooms, and potatoes hashed brown.  He likes them.  Good old G. S. I shall be right glad to see him.  Hope foreign travel has not given him the swell head.”