ntal, no less pathetic progression as a Survival
of the Fittest. He gathered that even more than old Jaegers, Mr. Ricardo
hated God Almighty and Jesus Christ, the latter of whom was intimately
connected with something called a Sun Myth--chiefly, Robert supposed,
because He was the Son of God. Mr. Ricardo could not leave these two
alone. He hunted them down, he badgered and worried them, he covered them
with gibes and insults. It seemed to Robert sometimes that even the
multiplication table was really a disguised missile hurled in their
unsuspecting and non-existent faces.

Mr. Ricardo appeared to have no friends. As far as Robert could make out,
when he was not at school he sat at his desk in the untidy, stuffy attic
in the still more untidy, stuffy boarding-house where he lived, and wrote
feverishly. What he wrote Robert did not know. There was an air of
mystery about the whole business, as though he were concocting a deadly
explosive which might go off at any moment. Sometimes he seemed dated,
sometimes cast down by the results, but always doggedly resolved.

"It is a long, hard struggle, Stonehouse," he would say. "There are more
fools in this world than you could conceive possible. Thank your stars
your friend isn't one of them. A fine, intelligent woman--a unique woman."

He talked a good deal about Christine and women in general.

"When once we can get them on our side," was one of his dark sayings, "the
last trench will be in our hands."

Then, one evening, to Robert's astonished displeasure, he walked home with
him, and somehow drifted up their dark stairs to the little sitting-room
where Christine was laying supper. It appeared that he had come to give
an account of his pupil's progress, but he was oddly excited, and when
Christine invited him to share their meal--surely he could have seen there
wasn't enough to go round, Robert thought--he accepted with a transparent,
childlike eagerness that made Robert stare at him as at a stranger. And
after supper, with the self-conscious air of a man who has waited for this
moment, be produced from his coat pocket a crumpled newspaper with the
title _Unshackled_ printed in aggressive letters on its pale-green cover.

"In my leisure time I write a good deal on a subject very dear to me, Miss
Forsyth," he said and screwed up his sharp nose in a kind of nervous
anguish. "I have here an article published last week--you are a
broad-minded, intelligent woman--