Ricardo drew himself up.  He plucked at Robert’s sleeve.  A change had come over him in the last minutes.  His sunken brown eyes had dried and become rather terribly alert.  Something too fine—­too exquisitely balanced in him had been disturbed and broken beyond hope.

“It proves what I have suspected for a long time, Robert.  You know it’s not a light thing to make an enemy like that.  He’s taken his time, but you see in the end he has taken everything I had.  First he made me a liar and a hypocrite.  Then he took you.  He sent that girl specially to come between us.  And now Miss Christine.  I suppose he thinks that’s done for me.  But it’s a great mistake to make people desperate, Robert.  You should always leave them some little thing that they care for and which makes them cowards.  Now, you see, I simply don’t care any more.  I don’t care for myself or even my poor sister.  I’m going to fight him in the open, gloves off.  I’ll wrestle with him and prevail.  I’ll give blow for blow.  I’m going now to Hyde Park to tell people the truth about him.  They take him altogether too lightly, Robert.  They’re inclined to laugh at him as of no account.  That’s a great mistake, too.  I shall warn them.”  He nodded mysteriously.  “God is a devil—­a cruel, dangerous devil.”

Then he bent and kissed Christine’s hand, very solemnly and tenderly, as some battered, comical Don Quixote might have done before setting out on a last fantastic quest.  And presently Robert heard him patter down the narrow stairs and over the cobbles to the open street.

They were alone now.  He bent over her and said:  “Christine—­Christine,” reassuringly, so that she should not be afraid, and gathered her in his arms.  How little she was—­no heavier than a child—­and cold.  Her grey head rested against his shoulder.  If she had only stirred and laughed, and said:  “Your father was strong too!” he would have answered gently.  He would have been glad that the memory of his father could make her happy.  But it was all too late.

He carried her into her room.  It was like her to have left it so neat and ordered—­each thing in its place—­her out-door shoes standing decorously together under the window, and her best skirt peeping out from behind the cretonne curtain.  Her hair-brush, with the comb planted in its bristles, lay exactly in the middle of the pine-wood dressing-table.  When she had put it there, she had not known that it was for the last time.

Or had she known?  She had called out to him so insistently.  She had wanted to say good-bye.  And he had gone on, not answering.

They said that people, at the end, saw their whole life pass before them.  Perhaps she had seen hers.  Perhaps she had trodden the old road that he was travelling over now.  Only her vision of it would be different.  It was James Stonehouse and Robert’s mother that she would see—­radiant figures of wonderful, unlucky people—­and little Robert, who belonged to both of them, tagging in the rear.