He looked at Micky. “I suppose you think I’m an infernal sweep, eh?” he asked curtly.

“No,” said Micky.

He had always expected that Ashton’s romance would end like this, and he felt vaguely sorry for the girl, though he had never seen her. She must have expected it, too, he thought. She must have known Ashton’s position all along. He followed his friend out of the room.

17

“You haven’t told me her address,” he said suddenly.

He decided that it would be better to send the letter––he did not want to see her. He hated a scene as much as Ashton did.

Ashton was at the top of the stairs.

“It’s on the letter. What have you done with it?”

There was an irritable note in his voice. “Don’t leave it lying there for that man of yours to see.”

Micky went back into the room. The letter lay on the table where Ashton had thrown it down.

He picked it up, glancing casually at the written address as he did so. Then suddenly his tall figure stiffened, and a curiously blank look filled his eyes, for the name scribbled there in Ashton’s writing was––

“Miss Esther Shepstone,” and, below it, the number of the very horrid boarding-house in the Brixton Road.

18

CHAPTER II

Micky stood staring at the envelope in his hand. He felt as if something had happened to paralyse all power of action.

Esther Shepstone and Ashton’s girl from Eldred’s were one and the same; that was all he could grasp, and it sounded absurd and impossible.

He had heard so much of this girl––Ashton had talked about her times without number––Lallie he had called her; now he came to think of it, Micky could not remember having ever heard her spoken of by any other name; and Lallie and Esther Shepstone were one and the same.

Was this, then, why she had cried, because of Ashton...?

Ashton called to him impatiently from the stairs.

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