Long before he could read words of three syllables, Robert had learnt the Origin of Man, and had made a vivid, somewhat fanciful picture of that personage’s pathetic beginnings as a miasm floating on the earth’s surface, and of his accidental, no less pathetic progression as a Survival of the Fittest.  He gathered that even more than old Jaegers, Mr. Ricardo hated God Almighty and Jesus Christ, the latter of whom was intimately connected with something called a Sun Myth—­chiefly, Robert supposed, because He was the Son of God.  Mr. Ricardo could not leave these two alone.  He hunted them down, he badgered and worried them, he covered them with gibes and insults.  It seemed to Robert sometimes that even the multiplication table was really a disguised missile hurled in their unsuspecting and non-existent faces.

Mr. Ricardo appeared to have no friends.  As far as Robert could make out, when he was not at school he sat at his desk in the untidy, stuffy attic in the still more untidy, stuffy boarding-house where he lived, and wrote feverishly.  What he wrote Robert did not know.  There was an air of mystery about the whole business, as though he were concocting a deadly explosive which might go off at any moment.  Sometimes he seemed dated, sometimes cast down by the results, but always doggedly resolved.

“It is a long, hard struggle, Stonehouse,” he would say.  “There are more fools in this world than you could conceive possible.  Thank your stars your friend isn’t one of them.  A fine, intelligent woman—­a unique woman.”

He talked a good deal about Christine and women in general.

“When once we can get them on our side,” was one of his dark sayings, “the last trench will be in our hands.”

Then, one evening, to Robert’s astonished displeasure, he walked home with him, and somehow drifted up their dark stairs to the little sitting-room where Christine was laying supper.  It appeared that he had come to give an account of his pupil’s progress, but he was oddly excited, and when Christine invited him to share their meal—­surely he could have seen there wasn’t enough to go round, Robert thought—­he accepted with a transparent, childlike eagerness that made Robert stare at him as at a stranger.  And after supper, with the self-conscious air of a man who has waited for this moment, be produced from his coat pocket a crumpled newspaper with the title Unshackled printed in aggressive letters on its pale-green cover.

“In my leisure time I write a good deal on a subject very dear to me, Miss Forsyth,” he said and screwed up his sharp nose in a kind of nervous anguish.  “I have here an article published last week—­you are a broad-minded, intelligent woman—­I thought perhaps it might interest you—­if you would care to glance over it.”

Christine lay back in her chair, her face in shadow.  But the lamplight fell on her two hands.  Red and misshapen as they were now, they were still noble hands, and their repose had dignity and beauty.