and then he knew that she was working, making up for those queer, wild play-hours.  He could imagine her under the shaded lamplight, the books heaped round her, and her hands clenched hard in the thick brown hair.  He could feel the peace, the rich, deep stillness round her.  And a loving tenderness, exquisite and delicate as a dream, welled up in him.  He said things out of his heart to her that he had never said:  broken, stumbling things, melted in the white-heat of their truth into a kind of poetry of which the burden never changed.  “I can’t live without you—­I can’t live without you.”  He could have knelt before her, burying his burning face in her lap in strange humility—­childlike surrender.

And when the window was dark he knew that she had gone out to dance, to the theatre, with friends whom he did not know, belonging to that other life in which he had no part.  And then his loneliness was like a black sea.  He leant against the railings, weak with weariness and hunger, fighting his boy’s tears, until she came.  He did not speak to her.  She never knew that he was there.  He hid, his heart stifling him, until the door closed on her.  Then, since she had come back to him, belonged to him again, he could go in peace.

The others—­Howard and Gertie and even Connie now—­went in and out, risking ruthless ejection if she were hard pressed, to sit in the best chairs, with their feet in the fender and drink coffee and smoke endlessly whilst they poured their good-natured cynicism over life.  If they were hungry they rifled Francey’s larder, and if they were hard up they borrowed her money.  But after the one time Robert never went.  He did not want to meet them.  And besides the big square room with its mark of other stately days—­its panelled walls, rich ceilings and noble doors—­was his enemy.  It was steeped in a mellow, unconscious luxury that threatened him.  There were relics from Francey’s old home, trophies from her Italian wanderings, books that his hands itched just to touch, and things of strange troubling beauty.  A bronze statue of a naked faun stood in the corner where the light fell upon it, and seemed to gather into itself everything that he feared—­a joyous dancing to some far-off music.

The room would not let him forget that Francey held money, which he had had to squeeze his life dry to get, lightly and indifferently.  She gave it with both hands.  She had always had enough, and it seemed to her a little thing.  Between people who cared for one another it counted less than a word, and his sullen refusal of every trivial pleasure and relief that lay in her power to give them hurt and puzzled her.  She saw in it only a bitter pride.

“You might at least let me make Christine’s life easier in little things,” she said.

He could not tell her that Christine would have been afraid for him, as he was afraid of the deep chairs that had seemed to clasp his tired body in drowsy arms, of the rugs that drank up every harsh sound, of the warm, fragrant atmosphere that was like a blow in the face of their chill and barren poverty.