eggs he had
ordered at random. There was a fly under one of the slices of bacon, and
Mavering confined himself to the coffee.

A man came up in a white cap and jacket from a basement in the front of
the restaurant, where confectionery was sold, and threw down a mass of
malleable candy on a marble slab, and began to work it. Mavering watched
him, thinking fuzzily all the time of Alice, and holding long, fatiguing
dialogues with the people at the Ty'n-y-Coed, whose several voices he
heard.

He said to himself that it was worse than yesterday. He wondered if it
would go on getting worse every day.

He saw a man pass the door of the restaurant who looked exactly like
Boardman as he glanced in. The resemblance was explained by the man's
coming back, and proving to be really Boardman.

XXII.

Mavering sprang at him with a demand for the reason of his being there.

"I thought it was you as I passed," said Boardman, "but I couldn't make
sure--so dark back here."

"And I thought it was you, but I couldn't believe it," said Mavering,
with equal force, cutting short an interior conversation with Mr.
Pasmer, which had begun to hold itself since his first glimpse of
Boardman.

"I came down here to do a sort of one-horse yacht race to-day," Boardman
explained.

"Going to be a yacht race? Better have some breakfast. Or better
not--here. Flies under your bacon."

"Rough on the flies," said Boardman, snapping the bell which summoned
the spectre in the black jersey, and he sat down. "What are you doing in
Portland?"

Mavering told him, and then Boardman asked him how he had left the
Pasmers. Mavering needed no other hint to speak, and he spoke fully,
while Boardman listened with an agreeable silence, letting the hero of
the tale break into self-scornful groans and doleful laughs, and ease
his heart with grotesque, inarticulate noises, and made little or no
comments.

By the time his breakfast came, Boardman was ready to say, "I didn't
suppose it was so much of a mash."

"I didn't either," said Mavering, "when I left Boston. Of course I knew
I was going down there to see her, but when I got there it kept going
on, just like anything else, up to the last moment. I didn't realise
till it came to the worst that I had become a mere pulp."

"Well, you won't stay so," said Boardman, making the first vain attempt
at consolation. He lifted the steak he had ordered, and peered beneath
it. "All right this time, any way."