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Updated: June 13, 2025
He was grotesque in his scorn, and yet Stonehouse, leaning with an apparent negligence against the mantel-shelf, felt himself go dead white under the attack. He had lost Cosgrave.
It was as though some clever hand were building up a fantastic figure that should pass at last into the mists of legend. Men laughed together over her. "What poor devil of a millionaire has the woman hobbled now?" It was the matron who showed Stonehouse an illustrated paper which produced her full-length portrait.
But even if a man were to juggle with his own integrity, turn charlatan, there was no faith-serum which you could inject into a patient's veins. Cosgrave sat limply in his stall, and by the reflected light from the stage Stonehouse could see his look of wan indifference. He was no better.
Robert Stonehouse stood alone among them, for nothing in his life had prepared him to meet them. He had been accustomed to encounter and master significant hardship, not an apparently meaningless luxury and aimless pleasure. They made him self-conscious and self-distrustful.
It had been a day full of bitterness of set-backs, which to Robert Stonehouse were like pointing fingers. They were the outward expressions of his disorder. He did not believe in luck, but in a man's strength or weakness, and he knew by the things that happened to him that he was weakening. A private operation had gone badly.
It was as though the fire had been withdrawn from a molten metal which began instantly to harden. A woman next to Stonehouse tittered. "So vulgar and silly I don't know what people see in her." "I want to get away," Cosgrave said sharply. "It's this beastly closeness." He looked and walked as though he had been drinking.
She herself sat on the edge of the fountain and fed a gorgeous macaw who, from his gilded perch, received her offerings with a lofty friendliness. But as Stonehouse entered she sprang up and ran to him, feeling through his pockets like an excited child. "The poison the poison!" she demanded. He had to laugh. "I forgot it," he said. "C'est dommage. You 'ave not taken it yourself by any chance?"
He had set out in the early morning for the nearest station to fetch their letters and fresh provisions, and at dusk a village youth reached Stonehouse with a note which had been scrawled in such haste that it was almost illegible. It was as though Cosgrave had yielded suddenly and utterly to a prolonged pressure. He had to go back to town. It was something urgent. Stonehouse was not to bother.
Then for a moment he had almost believed that they were all going to be happy together. That had been last night. Now there was nothing left but the bailiff, still slightly befuddled, an incredible pile of unwashed dishes and an atmosphere of stale tobacco. James Stonehouse had gone off early in a black and awful temper.
After a few days Harold went over to Varilands to stay for a while with the Stonehouses. Mr. Stonehouse had arrived, and both men were rejoiced to meet again. The elder never betrayed by word or sign that he recognised the identity of the other person of the drama of whom he had told him and who had come so accidentally into his life; and the younger was grateful to him for it.
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