He walked on again, slip-slopping in his shapeless boots through the slush, his head down to the rain.

“Christine,” Robert said, “don’t you remember Christine?”

(He himself had not thought of her for years, and now deliberately he had conjured her up.)

Mr. Ricardo hunched his shoulders.  He peered round at Stonehouse, frowning suspiciously.

“You are very persistent, sir.  Are you God?”

“No.”

“It is better to be quite frank with one another.  Not an emissary of God?”

“No.”

He seemed only half satisfied.

“You will excuse my asking.  I have to be very careful.  There have been certain signs of late that the enemy is anxious to negotiate—­to—­ah—­reach some compromise.  No direct offer, you understand, but various feelers—­hints—­suggestions—­terms of a most unscrupulous and subtle nature—­traps into which a man less—­ah—­wary than myself might well fall.  This Christine—­yes—­yes—­I have to be on my guard.”

“I have nothing to do with God,” Robert said gently.  “I’m a friend—­on your side.  I’d like to help.  If I knew where you lived so that I could learn more about your work——­”

But Mr. Ricardo shrank away from him.

“I don’t like the sound of that.  I dare say I do you an injustice, young man, but I can’t afford to take risks.  My headquarters are my secret.”

“Well”—­he tried to speak in a matter-of-fact and reasonable way—­“at any rate, a general must have munition.  I’d like to help financially.  You can’t refuse me that.”

They were almost through the labyrinth of Soho and on the brink of Oxford Street.  Mr. Ricardo stopped again with his hand spread out flat upon his breast in a gesture not without power and dignity.

“You think I am a failure, sir, because I go poorly dressed.  You are mistaken.  In the struggle that I am carrying on, outward and material things are of no account.  I might have all the wealth and all the armies of the world, sir, and be further from victory than I am now.  The fight is here, sir, in the spirit of man, and the weaker and poorer I become the nearer I am to the final effort.  I am a fighter, sir, stripping himself—­presently I shall throw off the last hindrance, and if the enemy will not show himself I shall seek him out—­I shall force him to stand answer——­” He broke off.  The chain of white-hot coherency had snapped and left him peering about him vaguely, and a little anxiously, as though he were afraid someone had overheard him.

“It has been very difficult—­there were circumstances—­so many circumstances——­” He sighed and finished on the toneless parrot-note of the street orator:  “My next meeting will be at Marble Arch, 3 p.m., on Tuesday.  Thank you for your attention, and good-night.”

He lifted his hat and bowed to left and right as though to an assembled multitude.  The lamp-light threw his shadow on to the grey, wet pavements, and with the soap-box perched on his shoulders it was the shadow of a huge hunchback.  Then he shuffled off, and Stonehouse lost sight of him almost at once in the dripping, uncertain darkness.