"If this goes on A shall go back to ma first love," he told Ruth with a characteristic touch of impudence.
"And a good job too," she answered tartly. "I don't want you."
"And you can go back to your Ernie," continued the engineer, glad to have got a rise.
"I shan't go back to him," retorted Ruth, "because I never left him."
The statement was not wholly true: for if Ruth had not left Ernie, since the affair of the Goffs she had according to her promise turned her back on him. When on the first opportunity that offered she had announced his fate to the offender, he had blinked, refused to understand, argued, insisted, coaxed—to no purpose.
"You got to be a man afoor I marry you again," she told him coldly. "I'm no'hun of a no-man's woman."
Ernie at first refused to accept defeat. He became eloquent about his rights.
"They're nothing to my wrongs," Ruth answered briefly; and turned a deaf ear to all his pleas.
Thereafter Ernie found himself glad to escape the home haunted by the woman he still loved, who tantalised and thwarted him. That was why when Joe girded on his armour afresh and went forth to fight the old enemy in the new disguise, Ernie accompanied him.
The pair haunted Unionist meetings, Ernie quiescent, the other aggressive to rowdiness. Young Stanley Bessemere, who had returned from Ireland (where he now spent all his leisure caracoling on a war-horse at the distinguished tail of the caracoling Captain Smith) to address a series of gatherings in his constituency in justification of the Ulster movement, and his own share in it, was the favoured target for his darts. Joe followed him round from the East-end to Meads, and from Meads to Old Town, and even pursued him into the country. He acquired a well-earned reputation as a heckler, and was starred as dangerous by the Tory bloods. Mark that man! the word went round.