"And when I come back----" he said again. "Tell her that when I come back many things may be all right again ... tell her that, will you?"
The guard was blowing his whistle now, doors were being shut.
Micky roused himself and looked at his friend.
"Are you--er--are you going to write to her?" he asked constrainedly.
"No--it's better not--far better let the thing drop till I come back. I've explained it all in my letter--she'll understand. It's no use writing--don't you think it's better not----"
"Yes, well, I shan't write--I'll send you my address as soon as I know where I'm staying, and you can let me know what she said and how she takes it.... Oh, confound it!"
A porter had come along and slammed the door; the train was slowly moving; Micky was vaguely glad that there had been no time in which to shake hands. A moment, and he was walking away alone down the platform.
His hands were deep thrust in the pockets of his coat; he took no notice of anything; he walked on and out of the station.
Well, this had been an eventful New Year's Eve with a vengeance; he glanced up at the clock in the dome behind him--only a quarter to twelve now, and yet so much had been crowded into the past four hours. Since the moment when the Delands rang up to cancel his engagement to dine he seemed to have stepped out of the old world into a new. He wondered what Esther Shepstone was doing in the very horrid boarding-house of which she had told him--if she was thinking of Ashton.
What a cad the man was, what a cad!--he was amazed that he had not discovered it before--to clear off and leave a girl like this, without a word of farewell except the letter. He wondered if he meant to deliver it and admit that he knew Ashton, or if he meant just to stick a stamp on and post it to her.
He realised that there was nothing very much to be proud of in an admission that he knew Ashton, and yet they had been friends for years.
It was striking twelve when he got home; he stood for a moment on the doorstep, looking up at the starry sky.
Several clocks were chiming midnight in the distance; he listened with a queer sense of fatalism.
This was the strangest New Year's Eve he had ever spent in his life. At this hour last year he had been dancing the old year out, and to-night, had things gone as he had thought, he would have been somewhere with Marie Deland--he might even have proposed to her by this time. He smiled faintly, remembering that the intention had really been somewhere in the background of his mind; but that, too, had faded out now to give place to other, more important, factors.