He passed softly over the heavy carpet of the smoking-room, and Spence was left alone once more.
Spence wasn't hungry yet. The light meal in the hammam had satisfied him. He resolved to go to the Empire alone, not because the idea of going seemed very attractive, but because he had planned it and could substitute no other way of spending the evening for the first determination.
So, about nine o'clock, he strolled into the huge, garish music-hall.
He went into the Empire, and already his contentment was beginning to die away again. The day seemed a day of trivialities, a sordid, uneventful day of London gloom, which he had vainly tried to disperse with little futile rockets of amusement.
He sat down in a stall and watched a clever juggler doing wonderful things with billiard balls. After the juggler a coarsely handsome Spanish girl came upon the stage--he remembered her at La Scala, in Paris. She was said to be one of the beauties of Europe, and a king's favourite.
After the Spanish woman there were two men, "brothers" some one. One was disguised as a donkey--a veritable _peau de chagrin_!--the other as a tramp, and together they did laughable things.
With a sigh he went up-stairs and moved slowly through the thronged promenade. The hard faces of the men and women repelled him. One elderly Jewish-looking person reminded him of a great grey slug. He turned into the American bar at one extremity of the horse-shoe. It was early yet, and the big room, pleasantly cool, was quite empty. A man brought him a long, parti-coloured drink.
He felt the pressure of a packet in his pocket. It was Cyril Hands's letter, he found as he took it out. He thought of young Lambert at the club, a friend of Hands and fellow-worker in the same field, and languidly opened the letter.
Two women came in and sat at a table not far from him as he began to read. He was the only man in the place, and they regarded him with a tense, conscious interest.
They saw him open a bulky envelope with a careless manner. He would look up soon, they expected.
But as they watched they saw a sudden, swift contraction of the brows, a momentous convulsion of every feature. His head bent lower towards the manuscript. They saw that he became very pale.