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The other man glanced at him.

“Yes, you told me,” he replied.

Paul drank the remainder of his glass of whisky.

“I told the landlady your wife was coming,” he said.

“Did you?” said Dawes, shrinking, but almost leaving himself in the other’s hands. He got up rather stiffly, and reached for Morel’s glass.

“Let me fill you up,” he said.

Paul jumped up.

“You sit still,” he said.

But Dawes, with rather shaky hand, continued to mix the drink.

“Say when,” he said.

“Thanks!” replied the other. “But you’ve no business to get up.”

“It does me good, lad,” replied Dawes. “I begin to think I’m right again, then.”

“You are about right, you know.”

“I am, certainly I am,” said Dawes, nodding to him.

“And Len says he can get you on in Sheffield.”

Dawes glanced at him again, with dark eyes that agreed with everything the other would say, perhaps a trifle dominated by him.

“It’s funny,” said Paul, “starting again. I feel in a lot bigger mess than you.”

“In what way, lad?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know. It’s as if I was in a tangled sort of hole, rather dark and dreary, and no road anywhere.”

“I know—I understand it,” Dawes said, nodding. “But you’ll find it’ll come all right.”

He spoke caressingly.

“I suppose so,” said Paul.

Dawes knocked his pipe in a hopeless fashion.

“You’ve not done for yourself like I have,” he said.

Morel saw the wrist and the white hand of the other man gripping the stem of the pipe and knocking out the ash, as if he had given up.

“How old are you?” Paul asked.

“Thirty-nine,” replied Dawes, glancing at him.

Those brown eyes, full of the consciousness of failure, almost pleading for reassurance, for someone to reestablish the man in himself, to warm him, to set him up firm again, troubled Paul.

“You’ll just be in your prime,” said Morel. “You don’t look as if much life had gone out of you.”

The brown eyes of the other flashed suddenly.

“It hasn’t,” he said. “The go is there.”

Paul looked up and laughed.

“We’ve both got plenty of life in us yet to make things fly,” he said.

The eyes of the two men met. They exchanged one look. Having recognised the stress of passion each in the other, they both drank their whisky.

“Yes, begod!” said Dawes, breathless.

There was a pause.

“And I don’t see,” said Paul, “why you shouldn’t go on where you left off.”

“What—” said Dawes, suggestively.

“Yes—fit your old home together again.”

Dawes hid his face and shook his head.

“Couldn’t be done,” he said, and looked up with an ironic smile.

“Why? Because you don’t want?”

“Perhaps.”

They smoked in silence. Dawes showed his teeth as he bit his pipe stem.

“You mean you don’t want her?” asked Paul.

Dawes stared up at the picture with a caustic expression on his face.

“I hardly know,” he said.

The smoke floated softly up.

“I believe she wants you,” said Paul.

“Do you?” replied the other, soft, satirical, abstract.

“Yes. She never really hitched on to me—you were always there in the background. That’s why she wouldn’t get a divorce.”

Dawes continued to stare in a satirical fashion at the picture over the mantelpiece.

“That’s how women are with me,” said Paul. “They want me like mad, but they don’t want to belong to me. And she belonged to you all the time. I knew.”

The triumphant male came up in Dawes. He showed his teeth more distinctly.

“Perhaps I was a fool,” he said.

“You were a big fool,” said Morel.

“But perhaps even then you were a bigger fool,” said Dawes.

There was a touch of triumph and malice in it.

“Do you think so?” said Paul.

They were silent for some time.

“At any rate, I’m clearing out to-morrow,” said Morel.

“I see,” answered Dawes.

Then they did not talk any more. The instinct to murder each other had returned. They almost avoided each other.

They shared the same bedroom. When they retired Dawes seemed abstract, thinking of something. He sat on the side of the bed in his shirt, looking at his legs.

“Aren’t you getting cold?” asked Morel.

“I was lookin’ at these legs,” replied the other.

“What’s up with ’em? They