'Between New and Clement's, of course.' He looked at her in momentary surprise, and then laughed. 'Oh, well, not above a mile from civilisation--and a shilling cab from aristocracy. I happen to lodge there.'
She looked at him curiously. He was shabby yet rather distinguished, shaggy but clean. He advised life, and he lived in Danes Inn, where an instinct told her that life would not be a very maddening or riotous thing.
'Come, you must live again, Mrs. Trevalla,' he urged.
'Do you live, as you call it?' she asked, half in mockery, half in a genuine curiosity.
A shade of doubt, perhaps of distress, spread over his face. He knocked out his pipe deliberately before answering.
'Well, hardly, perhaps.' Then he added eagerly, 'I work, though.'
'Does that do instead?' To Trix's new-born mood the substitute seemed a poor one.
What was his tone? Sad or humorous, serious or mocking? It sounded all.
'Oh, work's your propensity, is it?' she cried gaily and scornfully, as she rose to her feet. 'I don't think it's mine, you know.'
He made no reply, but turned away to pay for the beer. It was a trifling circumstance, but she noticed that at first he put down three _sous_ for the waiter, and then returned to the table in order to make the tip six. He looked as if he had done his duty when he had made it six.
They walked back to the hotel together and shook hands in the hall.
'6A Danes Inn, Mrs. Trevalla. Is it possible that my advice is working?'
'It's working very hard indeed--as hard as you work. But Danes Inn is only a refuge, isn't it?'
'I shall remember it. And now, as a formality--and perhaps as a concession to the postman--who are you?'
'No, I expect not. But I knew him very well. I'm not an impostor, Mrs. Trevalla.'
'Why didn't he mention you?' asked Trix. Vesey had been, on the whole, a communicative man.
He hesitated a moment before he answered.
'Well, I wrote to him on the subject of his marriage,' he confessed at last.
'I see,' she said, with an understanding nod. 'Well, that was--honest of you. Good night, Mr. Newton.'
This meeting--all their conversation--was fresh and speaking in her brain as she sat looking over the river in her recovered gown of blue. But for the meeting, but for the shabby man and what he had said, there would have been no blue gown, she would not have been in London nor in the flat. He had brought her there, to do something, to make something, to play with life as life had played with her, to have a revenge, to die, if die she must, of heat rather than of cold.