“It was stupid of him not to have come to me in the first place,” she said, with an effort.  “He should have known——­”

He broke in fiercely.

“You can’t—­can’t go like that.”

“I must.  If they had left an address—­but, of course, they haven’t.  I’ll have to track them down.  It won’t be so difficult.”  A spark of gaiety lit up her serious eyes.  “I’ll find Gertie lying on her back in the Sistine Chapel.  She’ll scorn the mirrors.”

“You can’t leave your work like that.”

“The hospital people have been awfully decent about it.”

“You told them——?”

“I told them I had urgent, personal business.”

“You told them a lie, then?”

(Steady.  Steady.  But it was too late.  His only hope lay in her understanding—­her pity.)

“It wasn’t a lie.  My friends are my business.”

“Your friends!” he echoed.

There was silence between them.  She was controlled enough not to answer.  It would have been better if she had returned taunt for taunt so that at last in the white heat of conflict his prison might have melted and let him free.  But there followed a cold, deadly interlude, in which their antagonism hardened itself with reason and bitterness.  He went and stood by the window looking out on to the dim square.  He said at last roughly, authoritatively: 

“Don’t go.  I don’t want you to go.”

(If only he could have gone on—­driven the words over his set lips—­“because I’m afraid—­because I’m at breaking-point—­because I can’t do without you.  I’m frightened of life.  I’ve been starved in body and heart too long.  I’m frightened because Christine is hard to wake at night—­because I can’t work any more.”)

“I’ve got to,” she said briefly, sternly.

He walked from the window to the door.

“You don’t care.  You care more for these two than you do for me.  I’ve lived hard and clean.  I don’t lie or steal.  I’ve never thought of any girl but you.  And you put me second to a feckless thief and a——­”

She stopped him.  Not with a word or gesture, but with the sheer upward blaze of a chivalrous anger.  And it was not only anger.  That would have been bearable.  It was sorrow, reproach, a kind of grieving bewilderment, as though he had changed before her eyes.

“You’d—­you’d better go, Robert.  We’re both of us out of hand.  We’ll see each other to-morrow.  It will be different then.”

He went without a word.  But on the dark stairs he stood still, leaning back against the wall, his wet face between his hands.  He said aloud:  “Oh, Francey.  Francey, I can’t live without you!” He would have gone back to tell her, but he was physically at the end of everything, and at the mercy of the power outside himself.  He thought: 

“There’s still to-morrow.  I’ll tell her everything.  I’ll help her to get away.  I’ll make her understand that it wasn’t Howard.  To-morrow it will be all right.”