But Rickman betrayed no enthusiasm.

“You’d better see the guv’nor about it.”

Mr. Pilkington looked Rickman up and down, and encountered an immovable determination in his gaze.

“Right you are.  I’ll send him word to-night.  Ta-ta!” He turned again in the moment of departing.  “I say, he must send a good man down, you know.  It’ll take an expert.  There’s a lot of old things—­Greek and Latin—­that’s something in your line, isn’t it?”

But Rickman’s line at present was the line of least resistance.  It was ten past ten, and Poppy Grace was “on” from ten fifteen to ten forty.

CHAPTER IX

She was only an ordinary little variety actress, and he knew her little programme pretty well by heart.  But her fascinations were independent of the glamour of the foot-lights.  It was off the stage that he had first come to know her, really know her, a thing that at the first blush of it seems impossible; for the great goddess Diana is not more divinely secret and secluded than (to a young bookseller) a popular Dance and Song Artiste in private life.  Poppy’s rooms were next door to the boarding-house balcony, and it was the balcony that did it.

Now, in the matter of balconies, if you choose to regard the receding wooden partition as a partition, and sit very far back behind it, you will have your balcony all to yourself, that is to say, you will see nothing, neither will you be seen.  If, however, you prefer, as Mr. Rickman preferred, to lean forward over the railings and observe things passing in the street below, you can hardly help establishing some sort of communication with the next-door neighbour who happens to be doing the same thing.  At first this communication was purely in the region of the mind, without so much as the movement of an eyelid on either side, and that made it all the more intimate and intense.  But to sit there Sunday evening after Sunday evening, when the other boarders were at church, both looking at the same plane-tree opposite, or the same tail-end of a sunset flung across the chimney pots, without uttering a syllable or a sound, was at last seen by both in its true light, as a thing not only painful but absurd.  So one evening the deep, full-hearted silence burst and flowered into speech.  In common courtesy Mr. Rickman had to open his lips to ask her whether she objected to his smoking (she did not).  Then it came to acknowledging each other in the streets; after that, to Poppy’s coming out and looking over the balcony about the time when Mr. Rickman would be coming home from the shop, and to Mr. Rickman’s looking to see if Poppy was looking; and so on, to that wonderful night when he saw her home from the Jubilee Theatre.  The stars were out; not that Poppy cared a rap about the stars.