"Bravo! Bravo!" "That's the trick!"--"Encore!"--"Oh, _she's_ my fancy
girl!"--"Encore-ore-ore-ore-ore!"

It was all over.




CHAPTER X


He hurried back to Bloomsbury, in the wake of her hansom, to the house
of the balcony opposite the plane-trees. The plane-tree was
half-withdrawn into the night, but the balcony hung out black in the
yellow light from its three long windows. Poppy was not in the
balcony.

He went up into the room where the light was, a room that had been
once an ordinary Bloomsbury drawing-room, the drawing-room of
Propriety. Now it was Poppy's drawing-room.

You came straight out of a desert of dreary and obscure
respectability, and it burst, it blossomed into Poppy before your
eyes. Portraits of Poppy on the walls, in every conceivable and
inconceivable attitude. Poppy's canary in the window, in a cage hung
with yellow gauze. Poppy's mandoline in an easy chair by itself.
Poppy's hat on the grand piano, tumbling head over heels among a
litter of coffee cups. On the tea-table a pair of shoes that could
have belonged to nobody but Poppy, they were so diminutive. In the