No one had given him help that he
had not earned. Even in himself he had been handicapped. The boy he
had been had wanted things terribly--silly, useless, gaudy things that
would have ruined him as they had ruined his father. He remembered how
in the twilight of Acacia Grove he had listened to the music of far-off
processions, and had longed to run to meet them and march with the
jolly, singing people, and how once it had all come true, and he had
lied and stolen.
Once only. Then he had stamped temptation under foot. He had become
master of himself. And now he was not tempted any more by foolish
desires. He meant to do work that would put him in the front rank of
big men.
And, thinking of the old struggle, he threw out his hand, as he had
done that night when he had met Francey Wilmot, and clenched the
slender, powerful fingers as though he had life by the throat, smiling
a little in the cold, rather cruel way that Cosgrave knew--a theatrical
gesture, had it been less passionately sincere.
It was in his consulting-room that Cosgrave found him after a
prolonged, muddle-headed search that had lasted till close on midnight.
Cosgrave himself was drunk--less with wine than with a kind of heady
exhilaration that made him in turn maudlingly sentimental or recklessly
hilarious. And yet there was a definite and serious purpose in his
coming--a rather pathetic desire to "put himself right," to get
Stonehouse, who leant against the mantleshelf watching him with a frank
contempt, to understand and sympathise.
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