im, 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 look all right," replied Paul, from his bed.

"They look all right. But