“I’m like that now.  I’ve got a dozen lives—­like a cat.  And one life doesn’t know what the other one’s doing.”  He laughed.  “Before breakfast I wash down the car of the man who owns our garage.  The rest of the morning I coach fellows for the Matric.  In the afternoon I swot for myself.  You see how I spend my evenings.  Brown’s been very decent to me.  I get part of my tips and two meals—­one for myself and one to take home.”  He showed her the parcel that he carried.  “Cold chicken and rice mould,” he said carelessly.  “We couldn’t afford that.”

He did not tell her that there had been times when, to keep their compact, they had gone without altogether, when Christine had fainted over her typewriter and he had watched her from out of a horrible, quivering mist—­too sick with hunger to help, or even to care much.  He did not want Francey to be sorry for him.

“And the tips?” she asked, with grave concern.  “I hope we played the game.  But poor old Howard is always so hard up——­”

“Oh, good enough.  Usually I get more than the others, and they hate me for it.  I’m quicker and I’ve got clean hands.  People like that.”

“I saw your hands first,” Francey said, “and I knew at once that you were something different.”

It was too dark for her to see his face.  Yet he turned away hastily.  He spoke as though he did not care at all.

“Brown’s a smart fellow.  He knows what’s coming, and what people are worth to him.  We’ve got an agreement that when I’m Sir Robert I’m to boost the old place and do his operations free.  I think he’ll be rather sick if he doesn’t need any.”

It was half a joke, but if she had laughed—­laughed in the wrong way—­the chances were that he would have turned on his heel and left her without so much as a good-night.  For he was strung up to an abnormal, cruel sensitiveness.  Whatever else they did, people did not laugh at him.  He had never given them the chance that he had given her.  He had learnt to be silent, and now she had made him talk and the result had been an uncouth failure.  He had thrown his hardships at her like a parvenu his riches.  If she did not see through his crudeness to what was real in him, she could only see that he was a rather funny young man who swaggered outrageously.  And that was not to be endured.

But she did not laugh at all.

“You’re sure of yourself, Robert.”

“Yes—­I am.”

“I’m sure of myself, too.  Because I’m sure of things outside myself.”

He did not try to understand her.  He was wrestling with the expression of his own experiences.  He threw out his free hand and turned it and closed the powerful, slender fingers, as though he were moulding some invisible substance.

“Outside things are colourless and lifeless—­sort of plastic stuff—­until we get hold of them.  We twist them to the best shapes we can.  Nothing happens to us that isn’t exactly like ourselves.  Even what people call accidents.  Even a man’s diseases.  I’ve seen that in the Wards.  People die as they live, and they live as they are——­”