But he saw her—­Christine lying white and still under the great mahogany side-board, Christine coming back day after day in gallant patience to scrub the floors and his ears, and pay the bills and chase away the duns, and do whatever was necessary to keep the staggering Stonehouse menage on its feet.

She had held him close to her and comforted him.

Her splendid faithfulness.

He laid her on the narrow bed against the wall, and smoothed her dress and folded her hands over her breast.  Her bag, which he had gathered up with her rolled on to the floor.  A book fell out.  He picked it up mechanically.  It was a little Bible, and on the fly-leaf was written: 

  “From JIM and CONSTANCE
    to their friend, CHRISTINE.”

The writing was his father’s.  It had faded, but one could still see how regular and beautiful it was.  Then the date.  His own birthday—­the first of all the unfortunate birthdays.

He looked at it for a long time, stupidly, not realizing.  Then suddenly he saw it—­in a new light.  Ricardo.  How frightfully—­excruciatingly funny.  Ricardo.  He felt that he was going to laugh—­shout with laughter.  It was horrible.  Laughter rising and falling—–­like a sort of awful sickness—­choking him.

Instead his heart broke.  He flung himself down beside her and pressed his face against her cold, thin cheek.  And, instead of laughter, sobs that tore him to pieces—­and at last, in mercy, tears.

“Oh, Christine, Christine—­my own darling!  I did love you—­I never told you—­you never, never knew how much!”

The earth-old cry of unavailing, inevitable remorse.

7

So there was no one but Francey now.

He did not know what he hoped, or indeed if he hoped for anything.  He turned to her instinctively.  And when the door of the ward opened he did, in fact, feel a faint lifting of the flat indifference which had followed on that one difficult rending surrender.  He went to meet her.  If she had looked at him with her usual straightness, she might have remembered the boy of whom she had been fond—­a small, queer boy, who did not like having his face washed, and who came to her truculent and swaggering, with smears under his red eyes.

Even then it is doubtful whether she could have changed the course on which both of them were set.

He did not want her to see.  And yet, unknown to himself, he did count on her instant understanding, on some releasing, quickening word or look that would give back life to the dead thing in him.  But her eyes, preoccupied and unhappy, avoided him.  He could not have appealed to her.  He could not have said, as he had meant to do, “Christine is dead.”  He was silenced by the certain knowledge that all real communication between them had been broken off.

“No. 10 is going to pull through,” she said.

They walked slowly down the corridor.  He found it difficult to keep his feet.  He wondered vaguely why she should talk of No. 10 when Christine was dead.  He was puzzled—–­confused.