“We shall if we manage things decently.  She likes you, and she’s the kind of woman to be sympathising and make a fuss over another woman—­particularly one who is under the weather and can be sentimentalised over.”

Hester was pushing crumbs about on the tablecloth with her knife, and a dull red showed itself on her cheek.

“I am not going to make capital of—­circumstances,” she said sullenly.  “I won’t.”

She was not a woman easily managed, and Osborn had had reason on more than one occasion to realise a certain wicked stubbornness in her.  There was a look in her eye now which frightened him.  It was desperately necessary that she should be kept in a tractable mood.  As she was a girl with affections, and he was a man without any, he knew what to do.

He got up and went to her side, putting his arm round her shoulders as he sat in a chair near her.  “Now, little woman,” he said.  “Now!  For God’s sake don’t take it that way.  Don’t think I don’t understand how you feel.”

“I don’t believe you know anything about the way I feel,” she said, setting her narrow white teeth and looking more like a native woman than he had ever seen her.  A thing which did not aid his affection for her, such as it was, happened to be that in certain moods she suggested a Hindoo beauty to him in a way which brought back to him memories of the past he did not care to have awakened.

“Yes I do, yes I do,” he protested, getting hold of her hand and trying to make her look at him.  “There are things such a woman as you can’t help feeling.  It’s because you feel them that you must be on your mettle—­Lord knows you’ve got pluck enough—­and stand by a fellow now.  What shall I do, my God, if you don’t?”

He was, in fact, in such straits that the ring of emotion in his voice was not by any means assumed.

“My God!” he repeated, “what shall we all do if you won’t?”

She lifted her eyes then to look at him.  She was in a sufficiently nervous condition to be conscious that tears were always near.

“Are there worse things than you have told me?” she faltered.

“Yes, worse things than it would be fair to bother you with.  I don’t want you to be tormented.  I was a deuced fool before I met you and began to run straight.  Things pile in now that would have lain quiet enough if Walderhurst had not married.  Hang it all! he ought to do the decent thing by me.  He owes something to the man who may stand in his shoes, after all.”

Hester lifted her slow eyes again.

“You’ve not much of a chance now,” she said.  “She’s a fine healthy woman.”

Osborn sprang up and paced the floor, set upon by a sudden spasm of impotent rage.  He snapped his teeth rather like a dog.