He got up and followed her awkwardly, with a sullen face and a childishly beating heart.  The kettle was already on the gas, and Francey gazing into an open cupboard that was scarcely smaller than the kitchen itself.

“It’s like a boy’s chemist shop,” she said casually, as though she had expected him, “with the doses done up in little white paper packets.  Is it a game, Robert?”

“A sort of game.  We used to use too much of everything, and at the end of the week there’d be nothing left.  So we doled it out like that.”

“Yes, I see.  A jolly good idea.  That way you couldn’t over-eat yourselves.”

“I—­I suppose you think I was an awful beast about the tea, don’t you?”

“No, I didn’t—­I don’t.”

“I was—­much firmer than I would have been, but I wanted you to stay.  So I couldn’t give in.”

“If it had been just Cosgrave and Miss Edwards?”

“It wouldn’t have mattered—­not so much.”

“I wasn’t hurt.  It was tactless of me.  But I wanted the tea.  I forgot.  And I wanted to stay, too.  I haven’t learnt to do without things that I want.”

“You think I don’t want them?”

She closed the cupboard door abruptly.  The kitchen was so small that when she turned they had to stand close to one another to avoid falling back into the sink or burning themselves against the gas jet.  He saw that the fine colour had gone out of her face.  She looked unfamiliarly tired.

“I think you want them terribly.  I suppose I’m not heroic.  I don’t like your saying ‘No’ always—­always.”

“I shall get what I really want in the end.”

She sighed, reflected, and then laughed rather ruefully.

“Oh, well, get the cups now, at any rate.”

“There are only three, Francey.”

“You and I will have to share, then.”

So she made him happy—­just as she had done when they had been children—­with a sudden comradely gesture.

But in the next room Mr. Ricardo had begun to talk again.  They had to hear him.  He was not crying any more.  His voice sounded hard and embittered.

“He’s changed.  He doesn’t care.  He pretended to listen.  He was looking at that girl.  She’s a strange girl.  I don’t trust her.  She believes in myths.  Oh, yes, I know.  She did not say so, but I can smell out an enemy.  She will try to wreck everything.  So it is in life.  We give everything—­sacrifice everything—­to pass on our knowledge, our experience, and in the end they break away from us—­they go their own road.”

Robert could not hear Christine’s answer.  He felt that Ricardo had thrown out his arms in one of his wild gestures.  “Not gratitude—­not gratitude.  He was to have carried on my fight.  To have been free as I am not——­”

Miss Edwards and Rufus Cosgrave came racketing back up the steep and creaking stairs.  It was like the whirlwind entry of some boisterous comet dragging at its rear a bewildered, happy tail.  They were as exultant as though their paper bags contained priceless loot rescued from overwhelming forces.