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"And when I come off ze manager kiss me on both cheeks. Et c'etait fait." They applauded joyously. Her brutal egotism was a good joke. They expected nothing else from her. She was like an animal whose cruelty and cunning one could observe without moral qualms. "It was a mean thing to have done," Stonehouse said loudly and truculently "a treacherous thing." A shadow was on Cosgrave's face.
He kept to his work from such an early hour in the morning until such a late hour of the night that the people marvelled at his endurance. But as the work went on the people would talk about Martin Cosgrave's building in the fields and tell strangers of it at the markets. They said that the like of it had never been seen in the countryside.
They gave her what they could extemporary gifts some of them a tawdry ring or a flower which she stuck jauntily among the outrageous feathers. The significantly small parcels she did not open either from idle good nature or from sheer indifference. Stonehouse wondered what Cosgrave's little box contained.
She picked up the photograph on the table and examined it with an unconscious impertinence. "You like 'er?" she asked. "That sort of woman?" "I don't know," he said. "I've never met her." "She is not your wife?" "She is Cosgrave's wife." It was evident that although the episode had been concluded less than three months before she had already almost forgotten it. "Cosgrave?
He wanted to nonplus and disconcert her, if such a thing were possible. Now that his first involuntary amusement was over he felt a return of the old malignant dislike. She had cost him Cosgrave's friendship, and he wanted to hurt her to get underneath that armour of soulless good-humour. "I knew that you'd turn up one day or other," he said. She looked at him with a rather wistful surprise.
Connie Edwards thereupon gave vent to an artificial groan of anguish, followed by an explosive giggle which would have lost her her half of Rufus Cosgrave's chair had he not put his arm round her.
When he came down from the hill there was a spring in Martin Cosgrave's step. He swung his arms. The blood was coursing fast through his veins. His eyes were glowing. He would need to make a map of the building. It was all burned clearly into his brain. From under the bed of his cabin he pulled out the wooden box. It had not been opened since he had fetched it from the far town.
Cosgrave's failure was like a personal challenge a defiance thrown in his teeth. The old fight was on again. It was against odds. But then, he had always fought against odds won against them. The room was Connie Edwards herself. It seemed to rush out at him in a tearing rage, flaunting its vulgar finery and its odour of bad scent and cheap cigarette smoke.
I've always realized that it would be natural to fall in love perhaps worse than most men and that if it was with a girl like Cosgrave's it would be sheer damnation. I'd have to fight it down. But loving you is different. It'll make me stronger. I'll work harder and better because I love you. I'll do bigger things because of you." Her head was bowed over her primroses.
But the light from the street lamp fell into his strange blue eyes, with their look of young and anxious hopefulness, and made them blink. Robert Stonehouse laughed. He knew what was in Cosgrave's mind, and it seemed to him half comic and half pathetic and rather irritating. "I don't suppose you have enough to pay for supper, anyway," he said roughly, "or you'll go without your lunch to-morrow.
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