She offered him her cigarette-case.  She seemed to be considering his remark carefully.  Suddenly she laughed out with an unfeigned enjoyment.

“I see.  My victims, hein?  You can make leetle jokes too.  But why so ver’ serious?  I’m not burying you, am I?”

“No.  You couldn’t.  And you’re not going to bury Cosgrave.  Oh—­I don’t want to waste my time and yours making accusations or appealing to what doesn’t exist.  I only want to point out to your—­your business instinct that Cosgrave isn’t worth burying.  He’s poor and he’s unlucky.  He won’t bring you luck or anything else.  Much better to let him go.”

“Let ’im go?  But I want ’im to go!  Yesterday I would not see ’im.  I didn’t want to see ’im.”

“That was a good reason.  It’s all rather late in the day, though.  Two months ago Cosgrave came to England with about 3000 pounds.  I know, because he told me.  And now that’s gone.  You know where.”

“I make a guess, my friend.”

“He bought you presents—­outrageous for a man in his position.”

“Someone ’ave to buy them,” she explained good-humouredly.  “I don’t ask about positions.  It’s not polite.”

“Now he’s at the end of his tether.  He’s got to go back to his job.  Last night he came to my rooms for the first time for weeks.  He was—­was almost mad.  When he first came to England he was very ill.  That does not concern you.  But what may concern you is that he has become dangerous.  He threatened to shoot you.”

“Well, before ’e know me ’e threaten to shoot ’imself.  Decidedly, ’e is getting better, that young man.”

Her shameless, infectious laughter caught him by the throat.  He wanted to laugh too, and then thrust her empty, laughing face down into the water of her comic fountain till she died.  There were people who were better dead.  He had said so and it was true, in spite of Francey Wilmot and her childish sentimentality.  Suddenly the woman in the hospital and this riotous houri were definitely merged into one composite figure of a mindless greed and viciousness.  He clenched his hands behind his back, hiding them.

“If you would only sit down we should talk so much ’appier,” she said regretfully.  “You seem so far off—­so ’igh up.  Please sit down.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Because you’re afraid we might get jolly together, hein?  Well, you stand up there then, and tell me something.  Tell me.  You don’t love nobody.  You are a very big, ’ard young man, who ’ave made ’is way in ze world and know ’ow rotten everybody else is.  You ’ave ’ad ’ard times and ‘ard times is ver’ bad for everyone, except per’aps Jesus Christ, for either they go under and are broken, un’appy people, or they come out on top, and then zey are ’arder than anyone else.  Well, you are ze big, ’ard young man.  But you run after this leetle Monsieur Rufus as though ’e was your baby brother.