“It’s all right, old man; it’s only me—­Robert.”  For Cosgrave had leapt up with an eager cry, and now stood staring at him open-mouthed.  The light was behind him, and the open mouth and blank, shadowy face made a queer, ghastly effect, as though a drowned man had suddenly stood up.  Then he sagged pitifully, and Robert caught him by the shoulders and shook him with a rough, boyish impatience.  “Don’t be an idiot.  It doesn’t matter all that much.  Exams are not everything.  Everyone knows that.  We’ll find something else.  If your people are too beastly, you’ll come and share with us.  I’ll see you through—­it’ll be all right.”

But a baffling change came over Cosgrave.  He shook himself free.  He stood upright, looking at Robert with a kind of stony dignity.

“Where is she?”

“Who?”

“Connie.  She sent you, didn’t she?”

“Yes.  We met——­”

“Where is she?”

“I don’t know.  Gone to the theatre probably.”

“Isn’t she coming back?”

“Not now.”

“Didn’t she send a message?”

“She said—­it was finish between you.  She’s a little rotter, Cosgrave.”

“She made me laugh,” Cosgrave said simply.  “I don’t mind about the exam.—­or about anything now.  I suppose I was bound to fail.  But I was so jolly happy.  I’d never had a good time like that.  It’s all over now.  She doesn’t care.  She said she couldn’t be tied up with a lot of trouble.  That’s what I am.  A lot of trouble.  It was all bunkum—­make-believe—­to think I could be anything else.”

So it wasn’t his failure.  It wasn’t even the loss of a good-for-nothing chorus-girl.  It was a loss far more subtle.  The recognition of it lamed Robert Stonehouse, knocked the power out of him, as though someone had struck and paralysed a vital nerve centre.  He could only stammer futilely: 

“She’s not worth bothering about.”

Cosgrave slumped back into his chair.  His hands lay on the table, half clenched as though they had let go and didn’t care any more.  He looked at Robert wide-eyed with a sudden absolute knowledge.

“That’s it,” he said.   “Not worth bothering about—­nothing in this whole
beastly, rotten, world. . . . . .”

3

A convenient uncle found him a berth as clerk to a trading firm in West Africa, and with a cheap Colonial outfit and 10 pounds in his pocket, Cosgrave set out for the particular swamp which was to be the scene of his future career.  He went docilely, with limp handshakes and dull, pathetic eyes.  If he betrayed any feeling at all, it was a sort of relief at getting away from everybody.  But emotionally he was dead—­like cheap champagne gone flat, as he expressed it in one twisted mood of self-revelation.

Probably he was thinking of Connie Edwards and of their last spree together.

But he never spoke of her.

And it was very unlikely that the swamp would give him a chance to see any of them again.