Chapter 2

I

1

They came to an idle halt near Cleopatra's needle, and leaning against the Embankment wall, looked across the river to the warehouses opposite, which, in the evening mist, had the look of stark cliffs guarded by a solitary watchful lion. The smaller of the two young men took off his soft hat and set it beside him so that he could let the wind brush through his thick red hair. He held himself very straight, his slender body taut with solemn exultation.

"If only one could do something with it," he said; "eat it--hug it--get inside of it somehow--belong to it. It hurts--this gaping like an outsider. Look now--one shade of purple upon another. Isn't it unendurably beautiful? But if one could write a sonnet--or a sonata--or paint a picture---- That's where the real artist has the pull over us poor devils who can only feel things. He wouldn't just stand here. He'd get out his fountain pen or his paint-box and make it all his for ever and ever. Think of Whistler now--what he would do with it."

"I can't," Stonehouse said. "Who's Whistler?"

Cosgrave laughed in anticipation of his little joke. "Nobody, old fellow. At least, he never discovered any bugs."

The wind snatched up his forgotten hat and it sailed off up river into the darkness like a large unwieldy bird. He looked after it ruefully.

"That was a new hat. I'll have to go home without one, and the Pater will think I've been in a drunken brawl, and there'll be a beastly row."

"That's the one thing he'll never believe. Well, I don't care. It'll be over soon. If I've passed that exam. I'll get away and he won't be able to nag me any more. And you, do think I've passed, don't you, Stonehouse?"

"If you didn't imagine your answers afterwards."

"Honour bright, I didn't. I believe I did a lot better, really. You know, I'm so awfully happy to-night I'd believe anything. It's queer how this old river fits in with one's moods, isn't it? Last time we were here I wanted to drown myself, and there it was ready to hand, as it were--offering eternal oblivion--and all that. I thought of all the other fellows who had drowned themselves, and felt no end cheered up. And now it makes me think of escape--of getting away from everything--sailing to strange, new countries----"

"The last time you were here," Stonehouse said, "you'd just come out of the exam. If you really answered as you say you did, there was no reason for your wanting to drown yourself."

"But I did. You're such a distrustful beggar. You think I just imagine things. No, I'll tell you what it was--I didn't care. There I was--I'd swotted and swotted. I'd thought that if only I could squeeze through I'd be the happiest man on earth. And then, when it was all over I began to think: 'What's it all for, what's it all about? What's the good?' Suppose I have passed, I'll get some beastly little job in some stuffy Government office, 200 pounds a year, if I'm lucky. And then if I'm good and not too bright they'll raise me to 250 pounds in a couple of years' time, and so it'll go on--nothing but fug, and dinge, and skimping, and planning--with a fortnight at the seaside once a year or a run over to Paris. I suppose it was good enough for our grandfathers, Stonehouse--this just keeping alive? But it didn't seem good enough to me. Don't you feel like that sometimes--when you think of the time when you'll be able to stick M.D., or whatever it is, after your name--as though, after all, it didn't matter a brace of shakes?"

Robert Stonehouse roused himself from his lounging attitude and thrust his hands deep into his trousers pockets. There was a nip in the wind, and he had no overcoat.

"No. When I've got through this next year I shall feel that I've climbed out of a black pit and that the world's before me--to do what I like with."

"Well--you're different." Cosgrave sighed, but not unhappily. "You're going to do what you want to do, and I expect you'll be great guns at it. I dare say if I were to play the piano all day long--decently, you know, as I do sometimes, inside me at any rate--and get money for it, I'd think it worth while---- But it takes a lot to make one feel that way about a Government office."

His voice was quenched by a sudden rush of traffic--a tram that jangled and swayed, a purring limousine full of vague, glittering figures, and a great belated lorry lumbering in pursuit like an uncouth participant in some fantastic race. They roared past and vanished, and into the empty space of quiet there flowed back the undertones of the river, solitary footfalls, the voice of the drowsing city. The loneliness became something magical. It changed the colour of Cosgrave's thoughts. He pressed closer to his companion, and, with his elbows on the balustrade and his hands clenched in his hair, spoke in an awed whisper.

"It does seem worth while now. That's what's so extraordinary. I feel I can stick anything--even being a Government clerk all my life. I don't even seem to mind home like I did. I'm in love. That's what it is. You've never been in love, have you, Stonehouse?"

"No."

"You're such a cast-iron fellow. I don't know how I have the nerve to tell you things. Sometimes I think you don't care a snap for anything in the world, except just getting on."

Robert Stonehouse hunched his shoulders against the wind. There was more than physical discomfort in the movement--a kind of secret distress and resentment.

"You do talk a lot of sentimental rubbish," he said. "It seems to me it's only a hindrance--this caring so much for people. It gets in a man's way. Not that it matters to you just now. You've got a slack time. You can afford to fool around."

"You think I'm a milksop," Cosgrave said patiently, "I don't mind. I dare say it's true. There's not much fight in me. I don't seem able to do without people like you can. I think, sometimes, if I hadn't had you to back me up I'd never have been able to stick things. Of course, I'm not clever, either. But you're wrong about being in love. It doesn't get in one's way. It helps. Everything seems different."

Stonehouse was silent, his fair, straight brows contracted. When he spoke at last it was dispassionately and impersonally, as one giving a considered judgment. But his voice was rather absurdly young.

"You may be right. I hadn't thought about it before. It didn't seem important enough. There was a woman I knew when I was a kid--a common creature--who was fond of saying that 'it was love that made the world go round.' (My father married her for her money, which didn't go round at all.) Still, in her way, she was stating a kind of biological fact. If people without much hold on life didn't fall in love they'd become extinct. They wouldn't have the guts to push on or the cheek to perpetuate themselves. But they do fall in love, and I suppose, as you say, things seem different. _They_ seem different--worth while. So they marry and have children, which seems worth while too--different from other people's children, at any rate, or they wouldn't be able to bear the sight of them. What you call love is just a sort of trick played on you. If crowds are of any use I suppose it's justified. It's a big 'if,' though."

Cosgrave smiled into the dark.

"It sounds perfectly beastly. Not a bit encouraging. But I don't care, somehow. Do you mind if I tell you about her? I've got to talk to somebody."

"I don't mind. But I don't want to stand here any longer. It's cold, and, besides, I've got to be up west by six."

They turned and strolled on toward Westminster. Robert Stonehouse still kept his hands thrust into his pockets, and the position, gave his heavy-shouldered figure a hunched fighting look, as though he had set himself to stride out against a tearing storm. He took no notice of Cosgrave, who talked on rapidly, stammering a little and scrambling for his words. The wind blew his hair on end, and he walked with his small wistful nose lifted to the invisible stars.

"You see, I can't tell anyone at home about her. It's not as though she were even what people call a lady. (Oh, I'm perfectly sane--I don't humbug myself.) Mother'd have a fit, and the Pater only looks at that kind of thing in one way--his own particularly disgusting way. She drops her aitches sometimes. But she's good, and she's pretty as a flower. I met her at a dance club. I'd never been to such a place before. And then one evening it suddenly came over me that I wanted to be among a lot of people who were having a good time. So I plunged. You pay sixpence, you know, and everybody dances with everybody. Of course I can't dance. She saw me hanging round and looking glum, I suppose, and she was nice to me. She taught me a few steps, and I told her about the exam, and how worried I was about it, and we became friends. I've never had a girl-friend before. It's amazing. And she's different, anyway---- She's on the stage--in the chorus to begin with--but you'd think they'd given her a lead, she's so happy about it. That's what I love about her. Everything seems jolly to her. She enjoys things like a kid--a 'bus ride, a cinema, our little suppers together. She loves just being alive, you know. It's extraordinary--I say, are you listening, Stonehouse?"

"I didn't know you wanted me to listen. I thought you wanted to talk. I was thinking of an operation I saw once--you wouldn't understand--it was a ticklish job, and the man lost his head. He tried to hide it, but I knew, and he saw I knew. A man like that oughtn't to operate."

"And did the other fellow die?"

"Oh, yes. But he would have died anyway, probably. It wasn't that that mattered. It was losing his nerve like that."

"If I saw an operation," Cosgrave said humbly, "I should be sick."

Stonehouse had not heard. They reached the bridge in silence, and under a street lamp stopped to take leave of one another. It was their customary walk and the customary ending, and each wondered in his different way how it was that they should always want to meet and to talk to one another of things that only one of them could understand.

"Why does he bother with me?" Cosgrave thought.

But he was sorry for Robert, partly because he guessed that he was hungry and partly because he knew that he was not in love.

"I wish you'd come along too," he said a little breathlessly; "I want you to meet her, you know--for us all to be friends together--just a quiet supper--and my treat, of course."

It was very transparent. He tried to look up at his companion boldly and innocently. But the light from the street lamp fell into his strange blue eyes, with their look of young and anxious hopefulness, and made them blink. Robert Stonehouse laughed. He knew what was in Cosgrave's mind, and it seemed to him half comic and half pathetic and rather irritating.

"I don't suppose you have enough to pay for supper, anyway," he said roughly, "or you'll go without your lunch to-morrow. Don't be an idiot. Look after yourself and I'll look after myself. Besides, if you think I'm not going to have a square meal to-night you're enormously mistaken. I'm going to dine well--where you'll never Set your foot, not until you're earning more than 250 pounds a year, at any rate."

"Word of honour?"

"Oh, word of honour, of course."

A shy relief came into the pinched and freckled face.

"Oh, well then--but I do want you to meet all the same; you see, she'd like it--she knows all about you. I'm always bragging about you. Perhaps I could bring her round--if Miss Forsyth wouldn't mind--if she's well enough."

Robert Stonehouse half turned away, as though shrinking from an unwelcome, painful touch.

"She's all right."

"Then may we come? I'm not afraid of Miss Forsyth. She's an understanding person. She won't think people common because of their aitches. Give her my love, won't you, Robert. And good night."

"Oh, good night!" He added quickly, sullenly: "You look blue with cold. Why don't you wear a decent coat? It's idiotic!"

"Because my coat isn't decent. I don't want her to see me shabby. And I like to pretend I'm rather a strong, dashing fellow who doesn't mind things. Besides, look at yourself!"

"I'm different."

"You needn't rub it in." He was gay now with an expectation that bubbled up in him like a fountain. He made as though to salute Robert solemnly and then remembered and clutched at his wind-blown hair instead. "Oh, my hat! Well, it will make Connie laugh like anything!" he said.

2

To be a habitue of Brown's was to prove yourself a person of some means and solid discrimination. At Brown's you could get cuts from the joint, a porter-house steak, apple tart, and a good boiled pudding as nowhere else in the world. You went in through the swinging doors an ordinary and fallible human being, and you came out feeling you had been fed on the very stuff which made the Empire. You were slightly stupefied, but you were also superbly, magnificently unbeatable.

Mr. Brown was an Englishman. But he did not glory in the fact. It was, as he had explained to Robert one night, his kindly, serious face glowing in the reflection from the grill, a tragedy.

"To be born an Englishman and a cook--it's like being born a bird without wings. You can't soar--not however hard you try--not above roasts and boils. Take vegetables. An Englishman natur'lly boils. And it's no good going against nature. You're a doctor--or going to be--and you know that. You've got to do the best you can, but you can't do more. That's my motto. But if I'd been born a Frenchman---- Well it's no use dreaming. If them potatoes are ready, Jim, so'm I."

Mr. Brown had taken a fancy to Robert Stonehouse from the moment that the latter had challenged him on the very threshold of his kitchen and explained, coolly and simply, his needs and his intentions. Mr. Brown was frankly a Romantic, and Robert made up to him for the souffles and other culinary adventures which Fate had denied him. He liked to dream himself into Robert's future.

"One of these days I'll be pointing you out to my special customers--'Yes, sir, that's Sir Robert himself. Comes here every Saturday night for old times' sake. Used to work here with me--waited with his own hands, sir--for two square meals and ten per cent. of his tips. You don't get young men like that these days--no, sir."

Robert accepted his prophetic vision gravely. It was what he meant to happen, and it did not seem to him to be amusing.

Brown's was tucked away in a quiet West End side street, and there was only one entrance. At six o'clock the tables were still empty, and Robert walked through into the employees' dressing-room. He put on his white jacket, slightly stained with iodoform, and a black apron which concealed his unprofessional grey trousers, and went to work in the pantry, laying out plates and dishes in proper order, after the manner of a general marshalling his troops for action. He was deft handed, and responsible for fewer breakages than any of the old-timers--foreigners for the most--who flitted up and down the passages with the look of bats startled from their belfries and only half awake. Through an open, glass window he could see into the huge kitchen, where Mr. Brown brooded over his oven, and catch rich, sensuous odours that went to his head like so many etherealized cocktails. He had not eaten since the morning, and though he was too strong to faint, it grew increasingly difficult to fix his mind on the examination question which he had set himself. He found himself wondering instead, what would happen if old Brown lost his _flair_ for the psychological moment in roasts, and why it was that a man who had performed an operation successfully a hundred times should suddenly go to pieces over it? What made him lose faith in himself? Nerves? A matter of the liver? We were only at the beginning of our investigations. And then poor little Cosgrave, who as suddenly began to believe in himself and in life generally because he had fallen in love with a chorus girl!

The head waiter looked round the pantry door. He was a passionate Socialist who, in his spare time, preached the extermination of all such as did not work for their daily bread. But he disliked Robert bitterly, as a species of bourgeois blackleg.

"You're wanted. There's a party of ten just come in. Hurry up, can't yer?"

Robert put down his plates and went into the dining-room with the wine list. His table-napkin he carried neatly folded over one arm.

And there was Francey Wilmot.

She had other people with her, but he saw her first. He could not have mistaken her. Of course, she had changed. She was taller, for one thing, and wore evening dress instead of the plain brown frock that he remembered. But her thick hair had always been short, and now it was done up it did not seem much shorter. And it still had that quaint air of being brushed up from her head by a secret, rushing wind--of wanting to fly away with her. She was burnt, too, with an alien sun and wind. Her face and neck were a golden brown, and in reckless contrast with her white shoulders. One saw how little she cared. She sat with her elbows on the table, and the sight of the supple hands and strong, slender wrists stopped Robert Stonehouse short, as though a deep, old wound which had not troubled him for years had suddenly begun to hurt again. And yet how happy he had been, as a little boy, when she had just touched him.

It was evidently a celebration in her honour. A tall young man with side whiskers who came in late presented her with a bunch of roses in the name of the whole company and with a gay, exaggerated homage. They were a jolly crowd. They had in common their youth and an appearance of good-natured disregard for the things that ordinary people cared about. Otherwise they were of all sorts and conditions, like their clothes. Two or three were in evening dress, and one girl who sat at the end of the table and smoked incessantly wore a shabby coat and skirt and a raffish billycock hat. Chelsea or the University Schools was stamped on all of them. There wasn't much that they didn't know, and there was very little that they believed in--not even themselves. For they were of the very newest type, and would have scorned to admit to a Purpose or a Faith. But they could not help being young and rather liking one another, and the good food and the promise of a riotous evening.

Robert knew their kind. He even knew by sight the side-whiskered young man who now clapped his hands like an Eastern potentate. He had been of Robert's year at the University, and had been ploughed twice.

"Wine-ho! Fellow creatures, what is it to be? In honour of the occasion and to show our contempt of circumstances, shall we say a magnum of Heidsieck? All in favour wave their paws----"

The girl in the billycock hat blew a great puff of smoke towards him.

"Oh, death and damnation, Howard! Haven't I been explaining to you all the afternoon that I owe rent for a fortnight to a devil in female form, and that unless someone buys 'A Sunset over the Surrey Cliffs seen Upside Down,' Gerty will be on the streets? Make it beer with a dash o' bitters."

Finally it was Francey who decided. She beckoned, not looking at him, and Robert with a little obsequious bow, handed her the wine card and waited at her elbow. He was not afraid of Howard's recognition. They had never spoken to one another, and in any case Howard would not believe his eyes.

It was strange to stand near to her again and to recognize the little things about her that had fascinated small Robert Stonehouse--the line of her neck, the brown mole at the corner of her eye which people were always trying to rub off, the way her hair curled up from her temples in two unmistakable horns. He had teased her about them in his shy, clumsy way. A very subtle and sweet warmth emanated from her like a breath. It took him back to the day when he had huddled close to her, hiccoughing with grief and anger, and yet deeply, deliriously happy because she was sorry for him. It made him giddy with a sense of unreality, as though the present and the intervening years were only part of one of his night stories, which, after their tiresome, undeviating custom, had got tangled up in a monstrous, impossible dream. And then a new fancy took possession of him. He wanted to bend closer to her and say, very quietly, as though he were suggesting an order, "What about your handkerchief? Do you want it back, Francey?"

Amidst his austerely disciplined thoughts the impulse was like a mad, freakish intruder, and it frightened him, so that he drew back sharply.

"Cider-cup," she said. "It's my feast--and I like seeing the fruit and pretending I can taste it. And then Howard won't get drunk and recite poetry. Three orders, waiter."

He took the wine card, but she held it a moment longer, as though something had suddenly attracted her attention. Their hands had almost touched.

"Yes--three orders will be enough."

The company groaned, but submitted. In reality they were too stimulated already by an invisible, exuberant spirit among them to care much. From where he waited for Francey's order on the threshold of the pantry Robert could see and hear them. It was really the old days over again. Fundamentally things outside himself did not change much. The Brothers Banditti had grown up. They were not nice children any more. The innocent building-ground and nefarious plottings against unpopular authority had given place to restaurants and more subtle wickednesses. But still Francey played her queer, elusive role among them. She was of them--and yet she stood a little apart, a little on one side. Probably Howard thought himself their real leader. They did not talk to her directly very much, nor she to them. But all the time they were playing up to her, trying to draw her attention to themselves and make her laugh with them. She did laugh. It did not seem to matter to her at all that they were often crude and blatant and sometimes common in their self-expression. She laughed from her heart. But her laughter was a little different. It sat by itself, an elfish thing, with a touch of seriousness about it, its arms hugging its knees, and looked beyond them all and saw how much bigger and finer the joke was than they thought it. She was the spirit of their good humour. They could not have done without her.

And he, Robert Stonehouse, stood outside the circle, as in reality he had always done. But now he did not want to belong. He knew now how it hindered men to run with the herd--even to have friends. It wasted time and strength. And these people were no good anyhow. Howard was one of these dissipated duffers who later on would settle down as a miraculously respectable and incapable G.P. The rest were vague, rattle-brained eccentrics who would fizzle out, no one would know how or care.

Only Francey---- But even in the old days it was only because of Francey that the Banditti had meant anything to him.

The head waiter pushed across the counter a jug of yellowish liquid in which floated orange peel and a few tinned, dubious-looking cherries.

"Take it, for God's sake! People who want muck like that ought to keep to Soho."

Robert poured out with an eye trained to accurate measurements in the laboratory. It was his practice to do well everything that he had to do. Otherwise you lost tone--you weakened your own fibre so that when the big thing came along you slumped. But he could not forget Francey Wilmot's nearness. It did not surprise him any more. But it charged him with unrest, and he and his unrest frightened him. He knew how to master ordinary emotion. Even when he carried off the Franklin Scholarship in the teeth of a brilliant opposition he had not allowed himself a moment's triumph. It was all in the day's work--a single step on the road which he had mapped out deliberately. But this was outside his experience. It had pounced on him from nowhere, shaking him.

He had to look up at her again. And then he saw that she was looking at him too, steadily, with a deep, inquiring kindness.

It was as though she had said aloud:

"Are you really a good little boy, Robert?"

The cider poured over the edge of the glass and over the table-cloth and in a dismal stream on to the lap of the girl with the raffish billycock hat.

"Well, that settles that," she said good-humouredly. "My only skirt, friends. She can't turn me out in my petticoat, can she? Oh, leave it alone, garcong; it doesn't matter a tinker's curse----"

He could not help it. In the midst of his angry confusion he still had to seek out her verdict on him--just as Robert Stonehouse had always done when he had been peculiarly heroic or unfortunate. And there it was, dancing beneath her gravity, her unforgotten, magic laughter.

At half-past ten Brown's cleared its last table. Robert Stonehouse rolled down his sleeves, picked up the parcel which had been placed ready for him on the pantry counter, said good-night to the head waiter, who did not answer, and with his coat-collar turned up about his ears went out in the street. It was quiet as a country lane and empty except for the girl who waited beyond the lamp light. He knew her instantly, and in turn two sensations that were equally foreign and unfamiliar seized him. The first was sheer panic, and the second was a sense of inevitability. The second was the oddest of the two, because he did not believe in Fate, but he did believe in his own will.

It was his own will, therefore, that made him walk steadily and indifferently towards her. His head bent as though he did not see her. It was really the wind in her hair now. It caught the ends of her long, loose coat and carried them out behind her. Her slender feet moved uncertainly in the circle of lamp-light. Any moment they might break into one of the quaint little dances. Or the wind might carry her off altogether in a mysterious gust down the street and out of sight. It was like his vision of her that evening in Acacia Grove. It made him feel more and more unreal and frightened of himself.

He was almost past her when he spoke.

"Robert Stonehouse," she said rather authoritatively, as though she expected him to run away; "Robert Stonehouse----"

He stopped short with his heart beating in his throat. But he did not take the hand that she held out to him. He could only stare at her, frowning in his distress, and she asked: "You do know who I am, don't you?"

"Yes. Francey--Francey Wilmot--Miss Wilmot." He forced himself to stop stammering, and added stiffly: "I did not know you had recognized me."

"Didn't you? I thought---- Well, I did recognize you anyhow. I was so astonished at first that I thought it was a sort of materialization. But you were absurdly the same. And then when you poured the cider out on to poor Gerty's skirt----"

"Was that one of my childish customs?" he asked. "I'd forgotten."

"I nearly stood up and shook hands."

"I'm glad you didn't."

"I thought you'd feel like that. I remembered that you had been rather a touchy little boy----"

"I was thinking of your friends. Howard, for instance."

"Why, do you know Howard?"

"By sight."

"If you've never even spoken to him you can't, of course, tell what he would have felt. Do you mind walking home with me? I don't live far from here, and we can talk better."

He held his ground, obstinate and defiant. It was unjust that anyone, knowing himself to be brilliantly clever, should yet be made an oaf by an incident so trivial.

"I'm sorry. I don't see what we can have to talk about. I'm not keen on childish recollections. I haven't time for them. And it's fairly obvious we don't move in the same set and are not likely to meet again." He burst out rudely. "I suppose you were just curious----"

"Of course. You'd be curious if you found me selling flowers in Piccadilly. You'd come up and say: 'allo! Francey, what have you been doing with yourself?' And you'd have tried to give me a leg up, if it only ran to buying a gardenia for old times' sake."

He suspected her of poking fun at him. And yet there was that subtle underlying seriousness about her and a frank, disarming kindliness.

"You think I'm down on my luck," he retorted, "and so anybody has a right to butt in."

"Not a right. Of course, if I'd met you in Bond Street, all sleek and polished, I shouldn't have dreamed of butting in. I should have said to myself, 'Well, that's the end of the little Robert Stonehouse saga as far as I'm concerned,' and I don't suppose I should ever have thought of you again. But now I shall have to go on thinking--and wondering what happened--and worrying." She drew her cloak closer about her like a bird folding its wings, and added prosaically: "I say, don't you find it rather cold standing about here?"

He turned with her and walked on sullenly, his head down to the wind. He thought: "I shall tell her nothing at all." But to his astonishment she was silent, and finally he had to speak himself.

"I'm afraid this silly business has broken up your party. Or was it getting too lively for you? Howard's beanos used to have a considerable reputation."

"He often seems drunk when he isn't," she returned tranquilly. "I think it's because he enjoys things more than most people are able to. It wasn't that. I wanted to see you so much, and I knew Brown's would be closing about now. So I sent them to a theatre. It seemed the safest place."

"And they went like lambs. But, then, the Banditti always did."

"Oh, the Banditti!" He guessed that she was smiling to herself. "The Banditti wouldn't have grown up like that. They were much too nice--never quite really wicked, were they? Just carried off their feet. Still, they were never quite the same after you left. I think they always hankered a little after the good old days when they rang door-hells and chivied their governesses. Probably they will never be so happy again."

"They had you. It was you they really cared about. Everybody did what you liked."

"You didn't."

"I did--in the end."

It was odd that they should be both thinking of that last encounter and that they should speak of it so guardedly, as though it were still a delicate matter.

"I didn't know you were never coming again. I waited for you in the afternoon--for weeks and weeks."

"Did you?" He looked at her quickly, taken off his guard, and then away again with a scornful laugh. "Oh, I don't believe it. You knew I wasn't nice--not your sort. You're just making it up."

"I wonder why you say that?" she asked dispassionately. "It's cheap and stupid. You're not really stupid and you weren't cheap, even if you weren't nice. And you know that I don't tell lies."

For a moment he was too startled and too ashamed to answer. Cheap. That was just the word for it. The sort of thing that common young men said to their common young women. And, of course, he did know. Her integrity was a thing you felt. But he could never bring himself to tell her that he had been afraid to believe too easily, or that he did not want to have to remember her afterwards, waiting there day by day, in their deserted playground. It troubled him already, like a vague, indefinite pain.

He did not even apologize.

"I suppose I should have come back sooner or later. But I didn't have the chance. My father died that night--unexpectedly." He brushed aside her low interjection.

"Oh, I was jolly glad. But after that we had to clear out. There was no money at all."

"But you lived in a big house. Your father was a great doctor."

"I was a great liar," he retorted impatiently. "I suppose I wanted to impress you. Perhaps he was a great doctor. Anyhow, he never did any work. There was a bailiff in the house when he died and a pile of bills. And not much else."

"What happened, then? Did you go with your stepmother? I remember how you hated her! You wouldn't admit that she was a mother of any sort."

"No. I don't know what became of her. I never saw her again after that night. I think she went to live with her own people. Christine took care of me."

"I don't remember Christine. I don't think you ever told me about her."

"I wouldn't have known how to explain. I don't know now. She was a sort of friend--my father's and mother's friend. There was an understanding between her and my mother--a promise--I don't know what. So she took me away with her. Not that she had any money, either. We went to live in two rooms in the suburbs, and she worked for us both. She had never worked before--not for money--and she wasn't young. But she did it."

"A great sort of friend. And she came through too----?"

He did not answer at once, and he felt her look at him quickly, anxiously, as though she had felt him shrink back into himself. She heard something in his silence that he did not want her to hear. He put his head down to the wind again, hiding a white, hard face.

"Oh, yes, and we still live in two rooms--over a garage in Drayton Mews. My room 'folds up' in the day-time, and she sits there and knits woollen things for the shops. She has to take life easily now. She had an illness, and her eyes trouble her. But she's better--much better. And next year everything will be different."

The street had run out into the still shadows of a great dim square. For a moment they hesitated like travellers on the verge of unknown country; then Francey crossed over to the iron-palinged garden and they walked on side by side under the trees that rattled their grimy, fleshless limbs in an eerie dance. There was no one else stirring. The eyes of the stately Georgian houses were already closed in the weariness of their sad old age.

But she asked no questions. She seemed to have drifted away from him on a secret journey of her own. He had to draw her back--make her realize----

"I shall be a doctor then," he said challengingly.

"You said you would be a doctor. We quarrelled about it."

"How you remember things----"

"You were such a strange little boy. Besides, you remember them too."

"That's different. I've never had anyone else----" He caught himself up. "I suppose you think I'm still bragging?"

"You never bragged. You always did what you said you were going to do--even stupid things, like climbing that old wall."

So she had seen him, after all. She had watched--perhaps a little frightened for him, a little impressed by his reckless daring.

"Oh, well, I admit it didn't seem likely. People think you have to have a lot of money. We've often laughed about it. For we hadn't anything except what we saved from week to week. And yet we've done it. You can do anything so long as you don't mind what you do. It depends on the stuff you're made of."

He threw his head up and walked freely, with open shoulders. After all, he was proud of those years, and had a right to be. They had tested every inch of him, and it would have been stupid to pretend that he did not know his own mettle. He heard his footsteps ring out through the fitful whimpering of the wind and they seemed to mark the rhythm of his life--a steady, resolute progression. The lighter fall of Francey Wilmot's feet beside him was like an echo. But yet it had its own quality. Not less resolute.

He heard her say quickly, almost to herself:

"It must have been hard going--but awfully worth while. An adventure. I can't be sorry for anyone who suffers on an adventure--any sort of adventure--even if it's only in oneself."

She was more moved than he could understand. But the wind, dashed with ice-cold rain, blew them closer to one another. He could feel the warmth of her arm against his. It was difficult to seem prosaic and casual.

"That's just it. Worth while. Why do people want 'chances' and 'equality' and things made smooth for them? What's the use of anything if there isn't a top and a bottom to it? What's the use of having enough to eat if you haven't been hungry? I'm going to be a doctor, and I might have slumped into the gutter. I'm jolly glad there is a gutter to slump into----" He broke off, and then went on more deliberately. "Christine and I mapped it out one night when I was ten years old. After school hours I used to run errands and sell newspapers. On half-holidays I went down into the West End and hunted taxis for people coming out of theatres. I took my exams and scholarship one after the other. We counted on that. I kept on earning in one way or another all through my first M.B. and during the two years I've walked the Wards. Now I've had to drop out for a bit to make enough to carry through my finals. Christine's illness was the only thing we hadn't reckoned with."

Her voice had an odd, troubling huskiness.

"You must be frightfully strong. But then you always were. You used to beat everyone----"

"I'm like that now. I've got a dozen lives--like a cat. And one life doesn't know what the other one's doing." He laughed. "Before breakfast I wash down the car of the man who owns our garage. The rest of the morning I coach fellows for the Matric. In the afternoon I swot for myself. You see how I spend my evenings. Brown's been very decent to me. I get part of my tips and two meals--one for myself and one to take home." He showed her the parcel that he carried. "Cold chicken and rice mould," he said carelessly. "We couldn't afford that."

He did not tell her that there had been times when, to keep their compact, they had gone without altogether, when Christine had fainted over her typewriter and he had watched her from out of a horrible, quivering mist--too sick with hunger to help, or even to care much. He did not want Francey to be sorry for him.

"And the tips?" she asked, with grave concern. "I hope we played the game. But poor old Howard is always so hard up----"

"Oh, good enough. Usually I get more than the others, and they hate me for it. I'm quicker and I've got clean hands. People like that."

"I saw your hands first," Francey said, "and I knew at once that you were something different."

It was too dark for her to see his face. Yet he turned away hastily. He spoke as though he did not care at all.

"Brown's a smart fellow. He knows what's coming, and what people are worth to him. We've got an agreement that when I'm Sir Robert I'm to boost the old place and do his operations free. I think he'll be rather sick if he doesn't need any."

It was half a joke, but if she had laughed--laughed in the wrong way--the chances were that he would have turned on his heel and left her without so much as a good-night. For he was strung up to an abnormal, cruel sensitiveness. Whatever else they did, people did not laugh at him. He had never given them the chance that he had given her. He had learnt to be silent, and now she had made him talk and the result had been an uncouth failure. He had thrown his hardships at her like a parvenu his riches. If she did not see through his crudeness to what was real in him, she could only see that he was a rather funny young man who swaggered outrageously. And that was not to be endured.

But she did not laugh at all.

"You're sure of yourself, Robert."

"Yes--I am."

"I'm sure of myself, too. Because I'm sure of things outside myself."

He did not try to understand her. He was wrestling with the expression of his own experiences. He threw out his free hand and turned it and closed the powerful, slender fingers, as though he were moulding some invisible substance.

"Outside things are colourless and lifeless--sort of plastic stuff--until we get hold of them. We twist them to the best shapes we can. Nothing happens to us that isn't exactly like ourselves. Even what people call accidents. Even a man's diseases. I've seen that in the Wards. People die as they live, and they live as they are----"

And now she did laugh, throwing back her head, and he laughed with her, shyly but not resentfully. It was as though a crisis in their relationship had been passed. He could trust her to understand. And he knew that though what he had said was true, it had also sounded young and sententious.

"You think I'm talking rot, don't you?"

"I only think you've changed," she answered, with a quick gravity. "Not outside. Outside you're just a few feet bigger and the round lines have become straight. But when you were a little boy you used to cry a good deal."

"I don't see--how did you know?"

"I did know. There were certain smears--I don't think you liked having your face washed--and a red, tired, look under the eyes. The point is that now I can't imagine your ever having cried at all."

"I haven't." He calculated solemnly. "Not for more than twelve years. I remember, because it was after I had played truant at the circus."

But he did not want to tell her about the circus. He stopped short and looked at his watch in the lamplight.

"Nearly twelve. We've been prowling round this place for an hour. I've got to get home and work. I thought you said you lived near here."

"I do. Over the way. The big house. I've two rooms on the top floor. Rather jolly--and near St. Mary's----"

"What--what do you want with St. Mary's?"

But she had already begun to cross the road, and the wind, coming down a side street with a shriek, sent her scudding before it like a leaf. She was half-way up the grey stone steps before he overtook her. She turned on him, the short ends of her hair flying wickedly.

"Of course, it's only right and natural that you should talk of nothing but yourself."

He stammered breathlessly.

"I didn't think--I'm sorry----"

"Do you suppose you're the only person who does what they say they're going to do?"

"What--not--not a doctor, Francey?"

"Not yet. I'm two years behind you. This will be my first year in the Wards. Next year you will be full-blown--perhaps on the staff--and I shall have to trot behind you and believe everything you say." She smiled rather gravely. "You will have got the big stick, after all."

He looked up at her, holding on to the spiked railing that guarded the yawning area. But he had a queer feeling that he had let go of everything else that he had held fast to--that he was gliding down-bill in a reckless abandonment to an unknown feeling. He knew too little of emotion to know that he was happy.

"Why--I shall be there too. I'll be on a surgical post--dresser for old Rogers. And he's going to take me on his private rounds."

It was not what he had meant to say. He had meant to say, "We shall see each other." Perhaps she guessed. Her hand rested on his, warm and strong and kind, as though nothing had changed at all. Because they were grown up she did not hold back in a conventional reserve. If only he could have cried she would have sat down on the steps beside him, and put her arm about him, and comforted him.

"And I want to meet Christine," she said.

He nodded.

"Rather."

"And it's been fine--our meeting again. But didn't you always know it would happen?"

"I believe I did. Yes, I did. I used to imagine----"

And then he knew and saw that she knew too. He saw it in the sudden darkening of her steady eyes, in the perplexity of her drawn brows. He felt it in her hand that scarcely moved, as though even now it would not shrink from whatever was the truth. It came and went like a flare of fire across the storm. And when it had gone, they could not believe that it had ever been. They were both shaken with astonishment. And yet, hadn't they always known?

"Good-night, Robert Stonehouse."

"Good-night."

But he could not move. He watched the blank door open, and her slender shadow stand out for a moment against the yellow gas-light of the hall. She did not look back. Perhaps she too was spell-bound. The door closed with an odd sound as though the house had clicked its tongue in good-natured amusement.

"Now you see how it happens, Robert Stonehouse!"

At any rate, the spell was broken. Hugging his parcel dangerously close he raced back to the shelter of the trees and waited. High over head the house opened a bright eye at him. He waved back at it with an absurd, incredible boyishness.

Then he walked on deliberately, firmly.

What was it he had to set his mind on?

Of course. That question of therapeutics----

II

1

"I don't understand it," Christine said. "It seems to me better than anything you've ever read to me."

She counted her stitches for the second time, and looked up at the sun that showed its face over the stable roof opposite, as though at a lamp which did not burn as well as it used to do. In the dusty golden light she was like a figure in a tapestry. Perhaps in its early days it had been a trifle crude, a trifle harsh in colour, but now worn and threadbare, trembling on decay, it had attained a rare and exquisite beauty.

She smiled back blindly into the little room.

"Don't you think so, Robert?"

Mr. Ricardo also looked at Robert, eagerly, pathetically.

"It was to gain your opinion--reinforce my own judgment--solely for that purpose--difficult to obtain, the impartial opinion of a trained mind----"

He had grown into a habit of talking like that--in broken disjointed sentences, which only Robert and Christine who knew his thoughts could understand. And now, in the midst of his scattered manuscript he waited, rubbing his shiny knees with his thin, grey, not very clean hands.

But Robert looked at Francey. He had sat all the time with his arms crossed on the oil-clothed table and looked at her, frankly and unconsciously as a savage or a street boy might have done. He was too tired to care. He had come straight from giving the limousine underneath an extra washing down for the Whitsun holidays and oil still lingered in his nails, and there was a faint forgotten smear of it on his cheek, and another near the thick upstanding hair where he had rubbed his hand across. They came as almost humorous relief in a face in which there were things ten years too old--the harsh and bony structure showing where there should have been a round boyishness, and the full mouth set in a fierce, relentless negation of itself. But the oil smears and the eyes that shone out from under the fair overhanging brows were again almost too young. They made the strength pathetic.

He, too, sat in the sunlight, which was not kind to his green, threadbare clothes. But the sun only came into the stable yard for an hour or two, and as it withdrew itself slowly along the length of the table he shifted his position to move with it, unconsciously, like a tired animal. Francey, cross-legged and smoking, on the couch which at night unfolded itself into a bed, saw the movement and smiled at him. Her eyes were as steady in their serenity as his were steady with hunger. She did not change colour, so that whatever she understood from that long scrutiny did not trouble her. He leant forward, as though he were afraid of missing some subtle half-tone in her voice.

"Mr. Ricardo thinks I'm unprejudiced. He's forgotten the times when he pulled my ears and smacked my head. But you are different, Francey. You can say what you think."

"But it wouldn't be at all helpful," she answered very solemnly. "To begin with, I have the scientific mind, and I cannot accept as a basis of argument an entirely untested hypothesis."

Connie Edwards thereupon gave vent to an artificial groan of anguish, followed by an explosive giggle which would have lost her her half of Rufus Cosgrave's chair had he not put his arm round her. There were only three chairs in the room, and as two of them had been already occupied when she and her companion had, as she expressed it, "blown in" half an hour previously, they had perched together, listening with clasped hands and an air of insincere solemnity. For Mr. Ricardo had not stopped reading. He had gone on as though he had not heard their boisterous entry, and even now would have seemed unaware of their existence but for something bitter and antagonistic in the hunch of his thin shoulders. His dark, biting eyes avoided them like those of a sullen child who does not want to see. But Miss Edwards appeared to be not easily depressed. She waved her hand in friendly thanks for the cigarette case which Francey tossed across to her, and, having selected her cigarette with blunt, viciously manicured fingers, poked Cosgrave for a match.

"Gawd Almighty, and Little Connie K.O.'ed in the first round by an untested hypo--hypo---- What was it, Ruffles dear? (Oh, do stop squeezing my hand! This isn't the pictures, and it's a match I want--not love.) An untested hypothesis. Thank you, dearie. I wonder if He's feeling as sore about it as I am?"

She gurgled over her cigarette, and Cosgrave smiled at everyone in turn, as though he had said aloud, "Isn't she a splendid joke?" He looked almost mystically happy.

"Of such is the Kingdom of Heaven," Mr. Ricardo muttered. "Mark it, mark it, Robert--the shallow thinking, shallow jesting, shallow living----"

Miss Edwards winked at Francey, and Francey looked back at her with her understanding kindliness. It seemed to Robert that ever since Connie Edwards had burst into the room Francey had changed. The change was subtle and difficult to lay hold of, like Francey herself. Mentally she was always moving about, quietly, light-footedly, just as she had done among the bricks and rubble of their old playground, peering thoughtfully at things which nobody else saw or looking at them from some new point of view. You couldn't be sure what they were or why they interested her. And now--he had almost seen her do it--she had shifted her position, come over to Connie Edward's side, and was gazing over her shoulder, with her own brown head tilted a little on one ear, and was saying in Connie's vernacular:

"Well, so that's how it looks to you? And, I say, you're right. It's a scream----"

In her mysterious way she had found something she liked in Connie Edwards, with her awful hat and her outrageous, three-inch heels and her common prettiness. Cosgrave obviously was crazy about her. He seemed to cling to her because she had an insatiable hunger for the things he couldn't afford. One could see that he had tried to model himself to her taste. He wore a gardenia and a spotted tie. And, bearing these insignia of vulgarity, he looked more than ever pathetic and over-delicate.

Cosgrave was an idiot who had lost his balance. But Francey was another matter. The Francey who had asked "And are you a good little boy?" accepted Connie Edwards without question. Because it was ridiculous to be hurt about it Robert grew angry with her and frowned away from her, and talked to Mr. Ricardo as though there were no one else in the room.

"I can't think why they didn't take it, sir. It's fine stuff. A shade too long for a magazine article. It may have been that, of course."

But Mr. Ricardo bent down and began to gather up his manuscript. The paper was of all kinds and sizes, covered with crabbed writing and fierce erasures. It was oddly like himself--disordered, a little desperate, not very clean. When he had all the sheets together he sat with them hugged against his breast and bent closer to Christine, speaking in a mysterious whisper.

"It's not that. Robert knows it isn't, but he doesn't care any more. He'll say anything. But I know. I've guessed it a long time. People have found out. They say to one another, when I send in my papers, 'This man is a liar. Every morning of his life he gives his assent to lies. And now he is going to teach the very lies he pretends to exterminate. We can't have anything to do with a man like that.' And there's a conspiracy, Miss Christine, a conspiracy----" His voice began to rise and tremble. "They've taken me off my old classes under the pretext that they are too much for me. They've set me on to Scripture. Then they told me I had to remember--remember circumstances--to prevent myself from saying what I thought of such devilish cruelty. But I saw that they wanted me to break out so that they could get rid of me altogether, and I held my tongue. One of these days, though, I shall stand up in the open places and tell the truth. I shall say what they have done to me----"

He had forgotten, if he had ever fully realized, that there were strangers about him. He shook his fist and shouted, whilst the slow, hopeless tears rolled down the sunken yellow cheeks onto the dirty manuscript.

They stared at him in consternation, all but Francey, who uncurled herself negligently and slid from the sofa.

"It's past my tea-time," she announced, "and I want my tea."

It was as though she had neither seen nor cared. Christine turned her faded, groping eyes thankfully in her direction.

"Of course, my dear. Robert--please----"

"No," he said; "we don't have tea, Francey."

"But, Robert, at least when we have guests----"

"Or guests," he added, with a set, white face.

Cosgrave laughed. He made a comic grimace. He seemed utterly irrepressible and irresponsible, like a colt let out for the first time in a wide field.

"You don't know this fellow like I do, Miss Wilmot. A nasty Spartan. But if you'll put a shilling in the gas meter we'll get cakes and a quarter of tea. He doesn't need to have any if he doesn't want it, but he can't grudge us a corner of table and half a chair each. Miss Christine's on our side, aren't you, Miss Christine? And oh, Connie, there's a pastrycook's round the corner where they make jam-puffs like they did when I was a kid----"

"I'll put the kettle on," Francey said, nodding to him.

She passed close to Robert. She even gave him a quick, friendly touch. He could almost hear her say, "Tag, Robert!" but he would not look at her. And yet the moment after he knew that it was all make-believe. His anger was a sham, protecting something that was fragile and afraid of pain. Now that she had gone out of the barren little room she had taken with her the sense of a secret, gracious intimacy which had been its warmth and colour. He saw that the sunlight had shrunk to a pale gold finger whose tip rested lingeringly on the windowsill, and he felt tired and cold and work-soiled.

He got up and followed her awkwardly, with a sullen face and a childishly beating heart. The kettle was already on the gas, and Francey gazing into an open cupboard that was scarcely smaller than the kitchen itself.

"It's like a boy's chemist shop," she said casually, as though she had expected him, "with the doses done up in little white paper packets. Is it a game, Robert?"

"A sort of game. We used to use too much of everything, and at the end of the week there'd be nothing left. So we doled it out like that."

"Yes, I see. A jolly good idea. That way you couldn't over-eat yourselves."

"I--I suppose you think I was an awful beast about the tea, don't you?"

"No, I didn't--I don't."

"I was--much firmer than I would have been, but I wanted you to stay. So I couldn't give in."

"If it had been just Cosgrave and Miss Edwards?"

"It wouldn't have mattered--not so much."

"I wasn't hurt. It was tactless of me. But I wanted the tea. I forgot. And I wanted to stay, too. I haven't learnt to do without things that I want."

"You think I don't want them?"

She closed the cupboard door abruptly. The kitchen was so small that when she turned they had to stand close to one another to avoid falling back into the sink or burning themselves against the gas jet. He saw that the fine colour had gone out of her face. She looked unfamiliarly tired.

"I think you want them terribly. I suppose I'm not heroic. I don't like your saying 'No' always--always."

"I shall get what I really want in the end."

She sighed, reflected, and then laughed rather ruefully.

"Oh, well, get the cups now, at any rate."

"There are only three, Francey."

"You and I will have to share, then."

So she made him happy--just as she had done when they had been children--with a sudden comradely gesture.

But in the next room Mr. Ricardo had begun to talk again. They had to hear him. He was not crying any more. His voice sounded hard and embittered.

"He's changed. He doesn't care. He pretended to listen. He was looking at that girl. She's a strange girl. I don't trust her. She believes in myths. Oh, yes, I know. She did not say so, but I can smell out an enemy. She will try to wreck everything. So it is in life. We give everything--sacrifice everything--to pass on our knowledge, our experience, and in the end they break away from us--they go their own road."

Robert could not hear Christine's answer. He felt that Ricardo had thrown out his arms in one of his wild gestures. "Not gratitude--not gratitude. He was to have carried on my fight. To have been free as I am not----"

Miss Edwards and Rufus Cosgrave came racketing back up the steep and creaking stairs. It was like the whirlwind entry of some boisterous comet dragging at its rear a bewildered, happy tail. They were as exultant as though their paper bags contained priceless loot rescued from overwhelming forces.

"Hurry up there, Mr. Stonehouse. Don't keep the lady waiting. Tea and puff, as ordered, ma'am. No, ma'am, no tipping allowed in this establishment. But anything left under the plate will be sent to the Society for the Cure of the Grouch among Superior Waiters."

She jollied Christine, whose answering smile was like a little puzzled ghost. She nourished a heavily scented handkerchief in the professional manner and grinned at Robert, whose open hostility did not so much as ruffle the fringe of her good humour. In her raffish, rakish world poverty and wry, eccentric-tempered people abounded, and were just part of an enormous joke. And Rufus Cosgrave, who gaped at her in wonder and admiration, saw that she was right. Poor old Robert and exams, and beastly, bullying fathers and hard-upness--the latter more especially--were all supremely funny.

But Robert would not look at the jam-puff which she pushed across to him.

"Thanks. I hate the beastly stuff."

And yet it was a flaky thing, oozing, as Rufus had declared, with real raspberry jam. And he was very young. But he would not give way. Could not. It seemed trivial, and yet it was vital, too. There was something in him which stood up straight and unbendable. Once broken it could never be set up again. And gradually a sense of loneliness crept over him. He went and stood next Ricardo, who, like himself, would have no share in the festivity. And the old man blinked up at him with a kind of triumph.

"And we're going to a hill that I know of," Francey was saying. "No one else knows of it. In fact, it's only there when I am. You go by train, and after that you have to walk. I don't know the way. It comes by inspiration. When you get to the top you can see the whole of England, and there are always flowers. I'm taking Howard's gang, and you people must come along too. It's what you want. A good time----"

"_All_ the time," said Miss Edwards, blowing away the crumbs.

"My people are going in a char-a-banc to Brighton," Rufus said. "But I'll give them the slip. There's sure to be a beastly row anyhow."

"That's my brave boy! Who cares for rows? Take me. Our Mr. Reilly's had the nerve to fix up a rehearsal for the new French dame what's coming to ginger up our show--and, oh, believe me, it needs it--but am I down-hearted? No! Anyway, if she's half the stuff they say she is they'll never notice poor little Connie's gone to bury her fifth grandmother. So I'll be with you, lady, and kind regards and many thanks."

"And you, too. Miss Forsyth?"

Christine shook her head. She was frowning up out of the open window a little anxiously.

"What would you do with a tired old woman?"

"Ruffles will carry you. Throw out your chest, Ruffles, and look fierce. What's the use of a hefty brute like that if it isn't useful?"

"And when you're on my hill," Francey said with a mysterious nod, "you'll understand it better than any of us." She looked away from the grey, upturned face. She added almost to herself: "How dark it is here! The sun has gone down behind the roof."

"Has it? Yes, it went so suddenly. I wondered"--she picked up her knitting, and began to roll it together--"if Robert could go?" she murmured.

"Robert can go. I knew before I asked."

But he flung round on her in a burst of extraordinary resentment.

"I can't. You seem to think I can do anything and everything that comes into your head. People like you never really understand. We're poor. We haven't the money or the time to--to fool round. Nor has Cosgrave, but he likes to pretend--humbug himself and anyone else silly enough to believe in him."

It was as though something long smouldering amongst them had blazed up. Cosgrave banged the table with his clenched fist. His freckles were like small suns shining out of his dead-white face.

"You--you leave me alone, Stonehouse. I--I'm n-not a kid any more. And I d-don't pretend. Connie knows I haven't a c-cent in the world except what poor mother sneaks out of the housekeeping. But I'm s-sick of living as I've done--always grinding, always afraid of everything. If I c-can't have my fun out of life I d-don't want to live at all. I'm not going to Heaven to make up for it--Mr. Ricardo has just told us that--so what's the use? You've g-got your work and that satisfies you. Mine doesn't satisfy me. So when you t-talk about me--you're just t-talking through your hat."

Miss Edwards threw up her hands in mock horror.

"Oh, my angel child, what a temper! And to think I nearly married him!"

She choked with laughter. And underneath the thin flooring, as though roused by her irreverent merriment, the big car shook itself awake with a roar and splutter of indignation. But the sliding doors were thrown open, and its rage died down at the prospect of release. It began to purr complacently, greedily.

It was strange how the sound quieted them. They looked towards the window as though for the first time they were aware of something outside that came to them from beyond the low, confining roofs--a spring wind blowing from far-off places.

"Six cylinder," Cosgrave muttered with feverish eyes. "Do you know, if I had that thing living under me I'd--I'd go off with it one night, and I'd go on and on and never come back."

Connie Edwards patted his head. She winked at Francey, but Francey was looking at Robert's sullen back.

"No, you wouldn't. Not for six months or so, anyhow."

He laughed shamefacedly.

"Oh, well, of course I'm rotting. I can't drive a go-cart. Never had the chance. Oh, I say, Robert, don't grouch. I didn't mean to be rude. Of course, you're right in a way. But I get that sort of stuff at home, and if I get it here I don't know what I'll do."

"Oh, you're right, too," Robert muttered. "It's not my business."

Cosgrave appealed sadly to Francey.

"He's wild with me. But a picnic--you'd think any human being might go on a picnic----"

"You're going," she answered quietly, "and Robert too."

He did not take up the challenge. He was too miserable. He had not meant to break out like that. As in the old days, he hungered for her approval, her good smile of understanding. But as in the old days, too, beneath it all, was the dim consciousness of an antagonism, of their two wills poised against one another.

The car purred louder with exultation. It came sliding out into the narrow, cobbled street. It waited a moment, gathering itself together.

"I wonder where it's going," Cosgrave dreamed. "I hope a jolly long way--right to the other end of England. I'd like to think of it going on and on through the whole world."

Christine leaned forward, peering out dimly.

"Are the trees out yet, Robert?"

They looked at her in silence. It was a strange thing to ask. And yet not strange at all. All day long she sat there and saw nothing but the squat, red-faced stable opposite. Or if she went out it was to buy cheaply from the barrows in a mean side street. And now she was remembering that there were trees somewhere, perhaps in bloom.

Even Miss Edwards looked queerly dashed and distressed.

"Now you're asking something, Miss Forsyth. There are trees in this little old village, but they aren't real somehow, and I never notice 'em. Well, we'll know on Monday. Please Heaven, it doesn't rain."

"I want to get out," Cosgrave muttered; "out of here--right away----"

"I've not had a picnic--not since I was a kid. But I haven't forgotten it, though. Heaps to eat--and an appetite---- Oh, my!"

"And you can go on eating and eating," Francey added greedily, "and it doesn't seem to matter."

"Egg and cress sandwiches----"

"Ham pie----"

"Sardines----"

"Russian salad--mayonnaise----"

"And something jolly in a bottle."

They laughed at one another. But after that the quiet returned again. Francey sat with her hands clasped behind her head and her chair tip-tilted against the wall. To Robert, who watched her from out of the shadow, she seemed to be drifting farther and farther away on a dark, quiet, flowing river.

It grew to dusk. The car had long since set out on its unknown journey. The narrow street with its pungent stable odour had sunk into one of those deep silences which lie scattered like secret pools along the route of London's endless processions. And presently Mr. Ricardo, who had not moved or spoken, but had sat hunched together like a captive bird, leant forward with his finger to his lips.

Christine had fallen asleep. Her hands lay folded upon her work and her face was still lifted to the black ridge of roof where the sun had vanished. There was enchantment about her sleep, as though in the very midst of them she had begun to live a new, mysterious life of her own. She had been the shadowy onlooker. She became the central figure among them.

Mr. Ricardo rose noiselessly. He looked at no one. He passed them like a ghost. They heard him creeping down the stairs and his hurrying, unequal footsteps on the empty street. Cosgrave and Connie Edwards nodded to one another and took hands and were gone. Francey, too, slipped to her feet. She gathered up her hat and coat, her silence effortless. She did not so much as glance at Robert, but at the head of the steep, ladder-like stairs he overtook her.

"Francey--listen----"

With one foot on the lower step, her back against the wall, she waited for him. It was too dark for them to see each other clearly. They were shadows to one another. They spoke in whispers, as though they were afraid of waking something more than the sleeper in the room behind them. He could not have told how he knew that her face was wet.

"I wanted to say--I don't know why I behaved like that. I'm not usually--nervy--uncontrolled. I don't think I've ever lost my temper before. I've had so little to do with people. Perhaps that's it. I've gone my own way alone----"

"And now that our ways have crossed," she began with a sad irony.

"No--not crossed--come together--run out together into the high-road----" He clenched his hands till they were bloodless in the effort to speak. "You see, a few weeks ago I wouldn't have lost my temper--and I wouldn't have said queer, silly things like this---- I'm a sort of kaleidoscope that someone's shaken up. I don't know myself; things have been hard--but awfully simple. I've only thought of--wanted--the one thing. It doesn't seem to me that I've had to fight until now. You don't understand--what it has been----"

"I do--I do!" she interrupted hurriedly. "I've seen Christine--and the way you live--and that dreadful cupboard. Oh, I'm not sorry for you--only afraid. You're nothing but a boy----"

"You needn't be afraid. I'll pull through. It's only another year now. But I can't be like the other people you know--who can be jolly and easy-going--because they're not going anywhere at all. Can't you be patient, Francey?"

"Was I impatient?" He felt her humour flicker up like a flame in the darkness. "I suppose I was. It was the jam-puff. You hurt their feelings. And it was such a little thing."

"I hate jam-puffs," he said, but humbly, because it was not the truth, and he could never explain.

"Come with us, Robert."

"I can't."

"But you want to come?"

"That's just it. I don't know why. It would be waste of time--money--everything--all wrong. What have I to do with Howard and that lot--with girls like Connie Edwards?"

"--and me," she added, smiling to herself.

"Or you with them?"

"Oh, they're my friends. As you say, they're not going anywhere--just dawdling along and picking up things by the wayside--queer, interesting things----"

"I've no use for them," he said doggedly.

"--And Christine wanted to go." She added after a moment, gently, as though she were feeling through the dark, "--is dying to go, Robert."

"You're just imagining it. She's never cared for things like that--only for my getting ahead with my work--my finals."

"Didn't you hear her ask about the trees?"

He looked back over his shoulder like a suddenly frightened child.

"Yes. It--it didn't mean anything, though. It was just for something to say."

"She said a great deal more than she meant to."

"We've mapped out everything--every ha'penny--every minute."

"Let me help, Robert. I've got such a lot. I've no one else. I could make it easier for you both. I should be happier, too. And you could pay me back afterwards with interest--a hundred per cent.--I don't care what."

But now feeling through the dark she had reached the barrier. He answered stonily.

"Thanks. We've never owed anything. We shan't begin now."

She slipped into her coat. She tugged her soft hat down over her hair. There was more than anger in her quick, impatient movements. She was going because she couldn't bear it any more. She had given in. She would never come back. And at that fear he broke out with a desperate cunning.

"It's too bad to be angry with me. I--I want to go."

"And I've asked you----?

"Because you want me?"

"Of course. It will be the first chance we've had to really talk----"

"It can't matter--just for once," he pleaded with himself.

"It might matter a great deal."

She went on down the stairs, very slowly, lingeringly. He leant over the creaking banisters, trying to see her.

"Francey--you duffer--you haven't even told me where to meet you."

"Paddington--the Booking Office--10.15."

He held his breath. Her voice had sounded like that of a spirit laughing out of the black veil beneath. It did not come again. He could not even hear her footsteps. She had vanished. But he waited, trembling before the wonder of his own impulse.

Supposing he had yielded--had taken her hands and kissed them--kissed that pale, beloved face, he who had never kissed anyone but Christine since his mother died?

He had not done it. It had been too difficult to yield. But he stood there, dreaming, with his hot eyes pressed into his hands, whilst out of the magic quiet rose wave after wave of enchantment, engulfing him.

2

They agreed that Francey had not boasted about her hill. It stood up boldly out of the rolling sea of field and common land and was tree-crowned, with primroses shining amongst the young grass. From its summit they could see toy villages and church, spires and motors and char-a-bancs running like alarmed insects along the white, winding lanes. But apparently no one saw the hill. No one came to it. Since it was everything that picnic parties demanded in the way of a hill, it was only reasonable to accept Francey's theory that it was not really there at all--or at most only there for her particular convenience.

They spread their table-cloth on its slope and under the dappled shadows of the half-fledged trees, with Christine presiding on the high ground. Her wispy grey hair fluttered out from under the wide black hat, and she looked pretty and pathetic, with her shabby black bag and her old umbrella, like a witch, as Howard said, who had been caught whilst absent-mindedly gathering toad-stools and carried here in triumph to bless their mortal festivity.

"The umbrella keeps off rain," he explained mysteriously, "and besides that, it's a necromantic Handley-Page which might fly off with her at any minute. When you see it opening, stand clear and hold on to yourselves."

He made a limerick on this particular fancy. It was a very bad limerick, as bad, probably, as his theories on pyridine and its relation to the alkaloids which had floored him in his last exam.; but the Gang applauded enthusiastically, and drank to Christine out of mugs of beer. Unlicked and cynical as they were, they seemed to have a chivalrous tenderness for her. And she was at home among them--silent, smiling wistfully down upon their commonplace eccentricities, as though through the mist of her coming blindness they were somehow lovable.

They ate outrageously of fearsome things. Yet over her third meringue Connie Edwards broke down with lamentations for the lost powers of youth.

"I can remember eating five of 'em," she said, "and coming home to a tea of winkles and bloater paste. Oh Gawd! I'll be in my grave before I can turn round."

She had been from the start in an unusually pensive and philosophic mood--a trifle wide-eyed and even awe-struck. It seemed that the night before the "French dame" had appeared unexpectedly during a rehearsal--a peculiarly gingerless performance according to Connie's account--and had watched from the wings awhile, and then, unasked and apparently without premeditation, had broken in among them and at the edge of the footlights, to a gaping, empty theatre, had danced and sung a little song.

"A French song," Connie said solemnly. "Not a word of the blessed thing could we understand, and yet we were all hugging ourselves. Not pretty either--a mere bone and a yank of hair--and no more voice than a sparrow. But you just went along too. Couldn't help it. And afterwards we played up as though we liked it, and hadn't been plugging at the rottenest show in England for the last ten weeks. And she laughed and clapped her hands, and our tongues hung out we were that pleased. She's It, friends. It. Gyp Labelle from the Folies Bergeres and absolutely It."

Rufus Cosgrave rolled over on his face and lay blinking out of the long grass like a sleepy, red-headed satyr.

"Gyp Labelle," he said drowsily, "Gyp Labelle!"

Robert knew that he was thinking of the Circus. And he did not want to think about the Circus. He pushed the memory from him. He was glad when Howard said gravely:

"That's genius. That's what we poor devils pray to and pray for. We know we haven't got it, but we're always hoping that if we agonize and sweat long enough, one day God will lean out of His cloud and touch us with His finger."

"Michael Angelo," said Gertie Sumners, with a kind of sombre triumph. "The Sistine Chapel. I've got a print of it in my room. That's where you saw it." She leaned back against a tree trunk with her knees drawn up to her chin, and blew out clouds of smoke, and looked more than usually grey and dishevelled and in need of a bath. "In a way it's like that with Jeffries. He rubs his beastly old thumb over my rottenest charcoal sketch, and it's a masterpiece."

Robert, lying outstretched at Francey's feet, wondered at them--at their talk of genius in connection with a revue star and a smudgy, underpaid studio hack, more still at their reverence for a God in Whom they certainly did not believe.

Miss Edwards snatched off her cartwheel hat smothered with impossible poppies, and sent it spinning down the hill.

"What's the good?" she demanded fiercely. "We're just nothing at all. We're young now. But when we aren't young, what's going to happen to the bunch of us?"

"This is a picnic," Howard reminded her. "Not a funeral. You haven't eaten enough. Have a pickle."

But the shadow lingered. It was like the shadow thrown by the white clouds riding the light spring wind. It put out the naming colours of the grass and flowers. It was as though winter, slinking sullenly to its lair, showed its teeth at them in sinister reminder. Then it was gone. It was difficult to believe it could return.

Robert looked up shyly into Francey's face, and she smiled down at him with her warm eyes. They had scarcely spoken to one another, but something delicate and exquisite had been born between them in their silence. He was afraid to touch it, and afraid almost to move. He felt very close to her, very sure that she was living with him, withdrawn secretly from the rest into the strange world that he had discovered. He was happy. And happiness like this was new to him and terrifying. He was like a waif from the streets, pale and gaunt and young, with dazzled eyes gazing for the first time into great distances.

"Italy----" Gertie Sumners muttered. She threw away her cigarette, and sat with her sickly face between her hands. "I've got to get there before I die. Think of all the swine that hoof about the Sistine Chapel yawning their fat heads off, and me who'd give my immortal soul for an hour----"

"You'll go," Howard said, blinking kindly at her. "I'll take you. We'll get out of this for good and all. I'll bust a bank or forge a cheque. You've got the divine right to go, old dear!"

Robert stirred, drawing himself a little nearer to Francey, touching her rough tweed skirt humbly, secretly, as a Catholic might touch a sacred relic for comfort and protection. They were talking a language that he could not understand---they were occupied with things that he despised, not knowing what they were; they made him ashamed of his ignorance and angry with his shame. He could not free himself of his first conviction that they were really the Banditti--inferior children, who yet had something that he had not. He was cleverer than they were. He would be a great man when they had wilted from their brief, shallow-soiled youth to a handful of dry stubble. (This Gertie Sumners would not even live long. He recognized already the thumb-marks of disease in her sunken cheeks.) And yet he was an outsider, blundering in their wake. Just because they accepted him, taking it for granted he was one of them, they deepened his isolation. He could not talk their talk. He could not play with them. He had tried. The old hunger "to belong" had driven him. But he was stiff with strength and clumsy with purpose. If he and Francey had not belonged to one another, he would have been overwhelmed in loneliness.

He shut his ears against them. But when she spoke he had to listen--jealously, fearfully.

"It would be no use, Howard. You'd come back. You can't strip off your nationality like an old-fashioned coat and throw it away. All this--isn't it English and different from any other country in the world--deeply, deeply different, just as we are different? England--she's a human, lovely woman, quiet and broad-bosomed, busy about her home, and only sometimes, in the spring and autumn, she stops a little to dream her mystic dreams. In the summer and winter she pretends to forget. She's anxious about many things--how she shall keep us warm and fed--a little stupid-seeming, with wells of all sorts of kindly wisdom.

"And Italy--the saint, the austere spirit, close to God, preparing herself for God, with unspeakable visions of Him. Where I lived"--she made a sudden passionate gesture of delight--"we looked over the Campagna, and there were three hills close to one another with towns perched on their crest, as far from the world and comfort as they could get. And at night they were like the three kings with their golden crowns and dark flowing robes, waiting for God to show them the sign.

"But we build our towns in the valleys and sheltered places. We like our trains to be punctual, and to do things in decent order. We pretend to be a practical and reasonable people. We're of our soil. In Italy what do trains matter--or when they come and go--when, even to those who don't believe in Him at all, it's only God who matters?" She laughed, shaking herself free. "So you'll come back, Howard--because you're part of all this. You'll always hate waiting for your train, and you'll always be a little ashamed of your dreams. And you'll never be real anywhere else."

Howard applauded solemnly.

"I'll make a poem of that--one day, when I'm awfully drunk, and don't know what I'm doing."

But Robert sat up sharply, frowning at her, white, almost accusing.

"When did you live in Italy, Francey?"

"Last year--all last year."

"You mean--you chucked your work--everything--just to play round----?"

Howard yawned prodigiously.

"You don't get our Francey's point of view, Stonehouse. You don't understand."

"Just to play round," she echoed to herself. Then she laughed and unclasped her hands from about her knees and stood up effortlessly, stretching out her arms like a sleepy child. "And now I'm going to gather sticks for a fire and primroses to take home. Coming Robert?"

"No," he muttered.

Howard rolled over in the grass.

"Sulky young idiot--if I wasn't half asleep--or I'd been asked----"

His voice died into an unintelligible murmur.

So she went alone. The rest, heavy with food and sunshine, nibbled jadedly at the remnants of the feast, exchanging broken, drowsy comments. Perhaps Gertie Sumners was brooding over the three kings with their golden crowns. But Robert knelt and watched Francey run down the hill-side, faster and faster, like a brown shadow. There was a thick belt of beech trees at the bottom, and she ran into them and was lost.

He rose stiffly. He did not want the others to see--he did not want to know himself, that he was following her. He strolled indolently about the crest of the hill, whistling to the breeze, his eyes hunting the wood beneath like the eyes of a young setter at heel. But when at last he was out of sight he slipped his leash and was off, running recklessly, headlong. The hill rose up behind him and sent him down its hillocky slopes as though before the horns of an avalanche. The wind blew the scent of trees and flowers and young grass against his burning face. It was like draughts of a cold, clear wine. It was like running full-tilt down Acacia Grove leaping and whooping.

It was frightening, too--a hand fumbling at the heart--this fierce coming to life of something dormant, this breaking free----

The wood had swallowed her. He drew up panting in the cool twilight. Beyond the faint breathing of the leaves overhead and the secret movement of hidden things, there was no sound. He walked on quickly. At first it was only suspense, childish, thrilling. Then it was more than that. His heart began to beat quickly. He tried to call her, but the quiet daunted him. The wood was a still, green pool into which she had dropped and vanished. It was an enchanted wood. There was enchantment all about her. They had seemed so near to one another--and then in a moment she had slipped away from him into a life of her own where he could not follow.

He had to find her and hold her fast. Nothing else mattered--neither his work, nor his career, nor Christine. It was terrible how little they seemed now--a handful of dust--beside this mounting, imperative desire. He had been so invulnerable. In wanting nothing but what was in himself he had been able to defy exterior events. Now he was stripped of his defence. He could be hurt. He could be made desperately happy or unhappy by things which he had thought trivial and purposeless--the playthings of inferior children.

He came upon her suddenly. She knelt in the long grass, idle, with a few scattered primroses in her lap as though in the midst of gathering them she had been overtaken by a dream. He called her by name, angrily, because of what he suffered. He stumbled to her and flung himself down beside her and held her close to him, ruthless with desire and his child's fear.

In that sheer physical explosion his whole personality blazed up and seemed to melt away, flowing into new form. He had dashed down the hill, a crude, exultant boy, into the whole storm and mystery of manhood. And for all his fierceness his heart was small within him, afraid of her, and of itself, and its own hunger.

At last he let her go. He tore himself from her and dropped face down in the grass, trembling with grief and shame. He heard her say: "Robert--dear Robert," very quietly, and her hand touched him, passing like a breath of cool wind over his hair and neck. He kissed it humbly, pressing it to his wet, hot cheek.

"I was frightened, Francey--and jealous--of everything--of the things you love that I don't even know of--of the places you've been to--of your friends--your money--your work. I thought you'd run away to Italy--or somewhere else where I couldn't follow--that I'd lost you----"

He saw her face and how deeply stirred she was. She had blazed up in answer to him, but that very fire lit up something in her which was not new, but which now stood out full armed--a clear-eyed austerity.

"I felt, too, as though I were running away--to the ends of the world--but not from you, Robert. I wanted you to come too. I asked you. You're not frightened now, are you?"

"Not so much."

"Let's be quiet--quite quiet, Robert. We've got to talk this out, haven't we? I've got to understand. Sit here and help me tie these together. They're for Christine. It'll make it easier for us. You didn't mean this to happen. It was the sun and wind--it goes to one's head like being out of prison after years and years. You mustn't make a mistake. You would never forgive yourself or me. I'd understand if you said: 'It was just to-day and being happy.' But I won't play at our being in love with one another, Robert."

"It isn't a mistake, I'm not playing. I don't pretend I meant to let you know. I was frightened. I wanted to hold fast to you. But I've been sure ever since that night at Brown's----"

"And yet you wanted to avoid me----"

He nodded. Ho knelt beside her, very white and earnest, with his hands clenched on his thighs.

"That was because I knew. I didn't think about it. But I knew all right. And I was afraid it would upset everything to care."

"Doesn't it?"

"Not caring for you. Of course, I know all about life. I'm young and I've never looked at a girl. I've always realized that it would be natural to fall in love--perhaps worse than most men--and that if it was with a girl like Cosgrave's it would be sheer damnation. I'd have to fight it down. But loving you is different. It'll make me stronger. I'll work harder and better because I love you. I'll do bigger things because of you."

Her head was bowed over her primroses. The sunlight falling between the trees on her wild brown hair kindled a smouldering colour in its disorder. He watched her, fascinated and abashed by the knowledge that she was smiling to herself. And suddenly, roughly like an ashamed boy, he took a grey and blood-stained rag from his inner pocket and tossed it into her lap.

"Do you remember that?"

She picked it up gingerly, amusedly.

"Is it a handkerchief, Robert?"

"Don't you remember it?" he repeated with triumph, as though in some way he had beaten her.

For a moment she was silent. And when she looked at him her eyes were no longer smiling.

"You kept it like that----?"

"I wouldn't even wash it. I hid it. It's got dirtier and dirtier."

"It must be horribly germy, Robert. We'll wash it together. As members of the medical profession we couldn't have it on our conscience----"

They laughed then, freely, out of the depth of their happiness. She laid her hand in his and he bent his head to kiss it.

"You do trust me, Francey?"

"Trust you?"

"You don't think it's weak of me to love you? You know I'll pass my finals, don't you--that I'll be all right? People might think I hadn't the right to love you till I was sure. But, then, I am sure--dead sure."

"I'm sure, too." Her voice sounded brooding, a little husky. She took his hand and laid it on her lap, spreading out the fingers as though to examine each one in turn. "It's a clever, beautiful hand, Robert--much the most beautiful part of you. It will do clever, wonderful things. What will _you_ do?"

(As though, he thought, his hands were something apart and she was inquiring deeper into what was vitally him.)

He told her. It reassured him to go back to his foundations and to find them still standing. He lost his tongue-tied clumsiness and spoke rapidly, clearly, with brief, strong gestures. His haggard youth gave place to a forcible, aggressive maturity. He was like an architect who had planned for every inch and stone of his masterpiece. Next year he would pass his finals. He would take posts as locum tenens whenever he could and keep his hospital connexions warm. In five years he would save enough to specialize--the throat gave wide opportunities for research. There were men already interested in him who would send him work. In ten years Harley Street--if not before.

In the midst of it all he faltered and broke off to ask:

"Why do you love me, Francey?"

And then, impulsively, she flung her arm about him and drew him close to her. His head was on her breast, and for one uncertain moment she was not Francey Wilmot at all, but the warm living spirit of the sunlight, of the quiet trees and the grass in which they lay--of all the things of which he was afraid.

"Because you're such an odd, sad, little boy----"

3

After tea it began to rain, not dismally, but in a gentle way as people cry who have been too happy.

"In this jolly old country fine weather means bad weather," Connie Edwards commented cynically. She had reason to be depressed. The impossible poppies dripped tears of blood over the brim of the cartwheel hat. But apart from that misfortune she had never got over her original mood of puzzled dissatisfaction, and she and Cosgrave walked droopingly down the narrow lane arm in arm and almost wordless.

So much of winter days was left that it was dark when they reached the foot of the hill--the eerie luminous darkness of the country when there is a moon riding somewhere behind the clouds. Robert could see Christine and Francey just ahead of him. Christine had taken Francey's arm, and they talked together in undertones like people who have secret things to say to one another. How small Christine was! She seemed to have shrunk into a handful of a woman as though the sun had withered her. She walked timidly, with bowed head, feeling her way. Her voice lifted for a moment into the old clearness.

"His father was a wonderful man--a wonderful, good man. Unhappy. Very unfortunate. Not meant for this world. His mother was my dear friend. If they had lived--those two---- I did what I could--I think they will be satisfied--it makes me happy----"

She murmured wearily. And Francey bent her head to listen. Robert loved her for the tenderness of that gesture. Yet it was bitter, too, that they should talk of his father. He wanted to go up to them and tell the truth brutally to Christine's face. He would have liked to have told them the one dream which he carried over from his sleep. But it would have been useless. Christine would only smile with a cruel, loving wisdom.

"You don't understand. You were only a child. Your father was so unhappy----"

The myth had become an invulnerable reality and had grown golden in the twilight of her coming blindness. James Stonehouse had been a good man, a faithful friend, and broken-hearted husband. If those two had lived everything would have been different. She threw her hallowed picture of them on the screen of the dripping dusk so that they seemed to live. Robert saw them too. That was his mother walking at Christine's side, and then his father---- In a sort of shattering vision Robert saw him, a man of promise, black-browed with the riddle of his failure, a man of many hungers, seduced by rootless passions, lured to miserable shipwreck because he could not keep to any course, because he could not give up worthlessness for worth.

Himself----

He staggered before the brief hallucination. The moisture broke out on his white face. It wasn't enough to hate his father. He had to be fought down day by day. He was always there, waiting to pounce out. He lay on his face, pretending to be dead----

It was gone. He shook himself free as from the touch of an evil, insinuating hand out of the dark. This love was his strength. If Francey were like his mother, then she was also good. It was these rag and bobtail friends that poisoned everything. They would have to be shaken off. Francey was a child, fond of gaiety and pleasure, with no one to guide her. She didn't understand.

Howard and Gertie Sumners were walking behind him now with the luncheon-basket between them, talking earnestly in muffled whispers that were too intimate, and behind them again came the Gang itself, laughing, jostling one another, exchanging facetiousness in their medical-Chelsea jargon.

His father would have liked them. Connie Edwards, no doubt, would have been one of those dazzling, noisy phenomena that burst periodically on the Stonehouse horizon.

Supposing he should come to like them too--to tolerate their ways, their loose living, loose thinking----?

He remembered how that very afternoon he had tried to be one of them, and sickened before himself.

Francey called to him through the darkness.

"Miss Forsyth's so tired, Robert. Couldn't you carry her?"

And he took Christine in his arms, whilst she laughed and protested feebly. It was awful to feel how little she was. Her head rested against his shoulder.

"It's a longer road than I thought. You're very strong, Robert. Your father was strong too."

It had been a successful day. And yet, as they sat packed close together in the dim, third-class carriage, they were like captives who had escaped and were being taken back into captivity. The sickly, overhead light fell on their tired faces, out of which the blood, called up by the sun and wind, had receded, leaving their city pallor. Connie Edwards had indeed produced a lip-stick from her gaudy bead bag, but after a fretful effort had flung it back.

"What's the good? Who cares----?"

And Cosgrave huddled closer to her, wan-eyed, hunted-looking. It was the ghost of that exam that wouldn't be laid--the prophetic vision of the row that waited for him, grinding its teeth.

Only Gertie Sumners and Howard had a queer, remote look, as though in that recent muffled exchange they had reached some desperate resolve.

The wet, gleaming platform slid away from them. There was a faint red light in the west where the sunset had been drowned. Christine turned her face towards it. She was like a little old child. Her little feet in the shabby, worn-out shoes scarcely touched the floor. Her drooping hat was askew--forgotten.

"It has been a wonderful day. But I mustn't come again. I'm too old. It's silly to fall in love with life when one is old."

Robert leant across to her. He ached with his love and pity.

"Tired, Christine?"

"A little. But it has been worth while. You carried me so nicely--so big and strong."

She leant against Francey, nodding and smiling to reassure him. And presently she was asleep. He saw how Francey shifted her arm so that it encircled the bowed figure, and every ugly thing that had dogged him in that lonely, haunted walk vanished before the kind steadfastness of her eyes.

It was as though she had said aloud:

"We'll take care of her together. We won't let her die before we've made her very, very happy."

Then he took out a note-book and made a shaky sketch of a pompous, drunken-looking house with a huge door, on which were two brass plates, side by side, bearing the splendid inscriptions:

Dr. Frances Stonehouse, Robert Stonehouse, M.D., F.R.C.S. Hours 10--1

He showed it to her and they smiled at one another, and there was no one else in the carriage but themselves and their happiness.

III

1

It meant a tightening--a screwing up of his whole life. Time had to be found. The hours had to be packed closer to make room for her. He grasped after fresh opportunities to make money with a white-hot assiduity. He worked harder. For he was hag-ridden by his unfaithfulness. He drew up a remorseless programme of his days, and after that Francey might only walk home with him from the hospital. And there was an hour on Sunday evening when he was too tired for anything else.

It meant a ceaseless, active negation: a "No" to the simple wish to buy her a bunch of flowers, "No" to the longing to walk a little farther with her in the quiet dusk, "No" to the very thought of her.

2

As usual, on the way home, they discussed their best "cases." There was No. 10 in A Ward, a raddled woman of the streets who had been brought in the night before as the result of a _crime passionnel_, and whose injuries had been the subject of long deliberations. Even before they had reached the hospital archway Robert and Francey agreed that Rogers' air of mystery was simply a professional disguise for complete bafflement.

"It's the sort of case I'd like to have," Robert said. "Something you can get your teeth into and worry. I believe if I were on my own--given a free hand--I'd work it out--pull her through. Rogers may too. But just now he's marking time. And there's nothing to hope from time in a job like that. No constitution. Rotten all through. Still, it would be a feather in one's cap."

He brooded fiercely, intently, like a hound on a hot scent. People turned to look at the big, shabby young man with the sunken, burning eyes that stared through them as though they had been so many shadows. He did not, in fact, see them at all. He made his way by sheer instinct across the crowded street.

"She's terribly afraid of death," Francey said. "It's awful to be so afraid. It must make life itself terrible."

"They'll operate soon as they dare--an exploratory operation. If only I could have a say--a real say! It's maddening to know so much--to be sure of oneself. I don't believe Rogers would take me out on his private work if he knew I knew all I do. I'm glad we're on a surgical post together, Francey. I don't know what I'd do if I hadn't got you to talk things over with."

"You daren't talk of anything else," she answered unexpectedly. "You're frightened of our being happy together. You're always trying to justify yourself."

"I'm not--what rubbish!"

He tried to laugh at her. It was so like Francey to dash off down a side issue. And yet it was true. He did try to think as much as he could of that side of their common life. It did add an appearance of stability and reason to the splendid unreason of his loving her. It made up to him for those dismaying breaks when her face and body stood like a scorching pillar of fire between himself and his work, to find that when they were together they could be sternly practical, discuss their eases and criticize their superiors as though, beneath it all, there were not this golden, insurgent sea whose high tides swirled over his landmarks. Not destroying them.

In those latter times he loved her humbly, with wonder and passionate self-abasement. But in their work they stood further away from one another. He could criticize her, and that gave him a heady sense of power and freedom. He never forgot the year that she had deliberately thrown away. And even now, when she stood at the beginning of the road which he had already passed over, she seemed to him full of strange curiosities and wayward, purposeless interests. There were days when an ugly Chinese print, picked up in some back-street pawnshop, or the misfortunes of one of her raffish hangers-on, or some wild student rag, appeared to wipe out the vital business of life. She was known to be brilliant, but he distrusted her power of leaping to conclusions over the head of his own mathematical and exact reasoning. He distrusted still more her tendency to be right in the teeth of every sort of evidence to the contrary. It seemed that she took into her calculations factors that no one else found, significant, unprofessional straws in the wind, things she could not even explain.

And yet she understood when he talked about his work, and that alone was like a gift to him. No one else understood--for that matter, no one else had had to listen. He knew that Christine was too tired, and poor overburdened Cosgrave would only have gazed helplessly at him, wondering why this strong, self-sufficient friend should pour out such unintelligible stuff over his own aching head. So he had learnt to be silent. Even now it was difficult to begin. He stammered and was shy and distrustful and eager, sometimes crudely self-confident, like a child who has played alone too long.

And Francey listened, for the most part critical and dispassionate, but with sudden gestures of unmotivated tenderness: as when in the midst of his dissertation on a theory of insanity and crime she had kissed him.

Sometimes for them both the prose and poetry of their relationship met and clasped hands. That was when they took their walk down Harley Street to have another look at the house which was one day to be adorned with the celebrated brass plates. At present it was solidly occupied by several eminent-sounding medical gentlemen who would have to be ruthlessly dislodged when their time came.

For it was the best house in the street, and, of course, the Doctors Robert and Francey Stonehouse would have to have the best.

And once they quarrelled about nothing at all, or about everything--they hardly knew. It was an absurd quarrel, which blazed up and went out again like fire in stubble. Perhaps they had waited too long for their allotted hour together--dreamed too much about it, so that when it came they could hardly bear it, and almost longed for it to be over. And in the midst of it Mr. Ricardo drifted in on one of his strange, distressful visits to Christine, and drove them out of doors to roam the drowsy Sunday streets, hand in hand, like any other pair of vulgar, homeless lovers. For Francey could not stay when Mr. Ricardo came. His hatred of her was a burning, poisonous sore that gave no peace to any of them.

"It's a sort of jealousy," Robert reflected. "We three have always held together. He's had no one else to care about. And now you've come, and he thinks you want to take me away from him."

"I do," Francey said unexpectedly.

"Not in the way he means."

"You don't know----"

"He's been good to me. I'd never have got through without him. I can't have him hurt. And you will fight him, Francey. I know he's crabbed and bitter, but so would you be if you'd been twisted out of shape all your life. And you only do it for the fun of the thing. Fundamentally, you think alike."

"We don't, that's just it. I'm sorry for him, and if it had been anything less vital I'd compromise--he'd compromise, too, perhaps. We'd both lie low and look pleasant about our differences. But as it is we can't help ourselves. We've got to stand up and fight----"

"I say, that sounds jolly dramatic."

"It is rather."

"Next thing you'll be saying you believe in God."

"Well, I do----"

He stopped short and let go her hand. He was physically ashamed and uncomfortable. He tried to laugh, but for the moment they were face to face, and he could not mistake her seriousness. They were like strangers, peering at each other through the grey dusk.

"Look here, Francey, dearest, you don't expect me to believe that? You're just joking, aren't you? You're--you're a modern woman, with a scientific training, too. You can't believe in an old, worn-out myth."

"I didn't say that."

"'An untested hypothesis,'" he quoted teasingly, but with a stirring anger.

"I don't know about that, either. We're both bound by our profession to admit an empirical test. And if we human beings can't survive without God----"

"But we can--we do."

"I can't."

He threw up his head.

"Why do women always become personal when they argue?"

"And why do rationalists always become irrational?"

They walked on slowly, apart, vaguely afraid. He wanted to change the subject, to take her by the arm and hold her fast. For she was drifting away from him. Her voice sounded remote and troubling, like a little old tune that he could not quite remember. Its emotion fretted his overstrained nerves. He wanted to close his ears against it. It was a trivial tune which might become a torment.

"It's not only me. It's everyone. Most of us are frightfully unhappy. Don't you realize that? And the more we understand life the more desperate we get. Savages and children may do without a god, but we can't. We know too much. Even the stupidest--the most careless of us. Think of Howard and Gertie and all that lot. Every second word is 'What's the good? What's it all about?' They make a great deal of noise to cover up their unhappiness. They're terrified of loneliness and silence. And one day it'll have to be faced."

"Oh, if you're going to take Howard as an example--" he interrupted.

"--and Rufus Cosgrave," she added.

He laughed with a boyish malice.

"Cosgrave doesn't need a god. He's got me. I'll look after him."

"You think you can? And then we ourselves. We're different, aren't we? We've got our work. We're going to do big things. For whom?--for what? For our fellow-creatures? But if we don't care for our fellow-creatures? And we don't, do we? Not naturally. The Brotherhood of Man is just dangerous nonsense. Naturally men loathe one another in the mass. How can we pretend to love some of those people we see every day in the wards with their terrible faces--their terrible minds? But the idea of God does somehow translate them--it gets underneath the ugliness--they do become in some mystic way my brothers and my sisters."

He found it strangely difficult to answer calmly. It would have been easier to have bludgeoned her into silence by a shouted "It's all snivelling, wretched rot!" like an angry schoolboy. He did not know why he was so angry. Perhaps Ricardo was right. It was something vital. He could feel the old man's shadow at his side, his hand plucking his sleeve, urging him on, claiming his loyalty. They were allies fighting together against a poisonous miasma that sapped men's brains--their intellectual integrity.

"Piling one fallacy on another isn't argument, Francey. We don't need to like our fellow-creatures. It's a mistake to care. Emotion upsets one's judgment. Scientists--the best men in the profession--try to eliminate personal feeling altogether. They're out for knowledge for its own sake. That's good enough for them."

"And the end of that--organized, scientific beastliness, like modern war. Knowledge perverted to every sort of deviltry. Huge swollen heads and miserable withered hearts. One of these days we'll blow ourselves to pieces----"

They were both breathless and more than a little incoherent. They had entered into a playful tussle, and now they were fighting one another with set teeth.

"I don't believe you believe a word you're saying," he stammered. "You know as well as I do that it's only since we began to throw off superstition that we've begun to move. Or perhaps you don't want to move--don't believe in progress."

"Progress towards what?" she flung back impetuously. "Perfection? Some point where we'd have no poverty, no war, no ignorance, no death even; where we'd all have every mortal thing we want? The millennium? That's only another word for Hell. It's only by pretending that there are things we want, and that we should be happy if we had them, that we can believe in happiness at all. All this unrest, this sick despair every morning of our lives when we drag ourselves out of bed and wonder why we bother--it's just because we've begun to suspect that the millennium is of no use to us. We've got to have more than that--some sort of spiritual background--or cut our throats."

"Wild rhapsodizing, Francey. You don't know a thing."

"I don't. Nor do you. When I said I believed, I meant I hoped--I trusted. And if there isn't a God at the end of it all, you people who want to keep us alive for the sake of the knowledge you get out of us will have to make one up."

Whereat, suddenly, in a cool, refreshing gust, their sense of humour returned and blew them close to one another. They laughed and took hands again--a little shyly, like lovers who had been parted for a long time.

"What rot--our quarrelling over nothing at all," Robert said, "when we've only got this hour together. I wanted to say 'I love you, Francey--I love you, dear' over and over again. Say 'I love you too, Robert.'"

"I love you too," she answered soberly.

But the crack was there--a mere fissure in the ground between them--a place to be avoided even in their thoughts.

3

At night when his work was over and the unrest grew too strong to be fought, he crept down the black, creaking stairs, through the sleeping backwater of Drayton Mews, and out into the streets. He walked fast, with his head down, guiltily, like a man flying from a crime. But in the grave square where Francey Wilmot lived he slackened speed, and, under the thick mantle of the trees, stood so still that he was only a deeper shadow. Then release came. It was like gentle summer rain falling on his fever. There was no one to see his weakness. He could think and feel simply and naturally as a lover, without remorse. Sometimes a light burnt in her window, and then he knew that she was working, making up for those queer, wild play-hours. He could imagine her under the shaded lamplight, the books heaped round her, and her hands clenched hard in the thick brown hair. He could feel the peace, the rich, deep stillness round her. And a loving tenderness, exquisite and delicate as a dream, welled up in him. He said things out of his heart to her that he had never said: broken, stumbling things, melted in the white-heat of their truth into a kind of poetry of which the burden never changed. "I can't live without you--I can't live without you." He could have knelt before her, burying his burning face in her lap in strange humility--childlike surrender.

And when the window was dark he knew that she had gone out to dance, to the theatre, with friends whom he did not know, belonging to that other life in which he had no part. And then his loneliness was like a black sea. He leant against the railings, weak with weariness and hunger, fighting his boy's tears, until she came. He did not speak to her. She never knew that he was there. He hid, his heart stifling him, until the door closed on her. Then, since she had come back to him, belonged to him again, he could go in peace.

The others--Howard and Gertie and even Connie now--went in and out, risking ruthless ejection if she were hard pressed, to sit in the best chairs, with their feet in the fender and drink coffee and smoke endlessly whilst they poured their good-natured cynicism over life. If they were hungry they rifled Francey's larder, and if they were hard up they borrowed her money. But after the one time Robert never went. He did not want to meet them. And besides the big square room with its mark of other stately days--its panelled walls, rich ceilings and noble doors--was his enemy. It was steeped in a mellow, unconscious luxury that threatened him. There were relics from Francey's old home, trophies from her Italian wanderings, books that his hands itched just to touch, and things of strange troubling beauty. A bronze statue of a naked faun stood in the corner where the light fell upon it, and seemed to gather into itself everything that he feared--a joyous dancing to some far-off music.

The room would not let him forget that Francey held money, which he had had to squeeze his life dry to get, lightly and indifferently. She gave it with both hands. She had always had enough, and it seemed to her a little thing. Between people who cared for one another it counted less than a word, and his sullen refusal of every trivial pleasure and relief that lay in her power to give them hurt and puzzled her. She saw in it only a bitter pride.

"You might at least let me make Christine's life easier in little things," she said.

He could not tell her that Christine would have been afraid for him, as he was afraid of the deep chairs that had seemed to clasp his tired body in drowsy arms, of the rugs that drank up every harsh sound, of the warm, fragrant atmosphere that was like a blow in the face of their chill and barren poverty.

So after that one time he kept away. But he could always see the room and Francey working there, and the slender, joyful body of the faun poised on the verge of its mystic dance.

Once, Francey was too strong for him, and they bought tickets for the theatre, and he sat hunched beside her in the front row of the cheap seats and stared down at the great square of light like an outcast gazing at the golden gates of Paradise. It was _The Tempest_, and he hardly understood. It broke over him in overpowering sound and colour. He was dazed and blinded. He forgot Francey. He sat with his gaunt white face between his bands and watched them pass: Prospero, Miranda, Ferdinand, Ariel--figures of a noble, glittering company--and wretched, uncouth Caliban crouched on the outskirts of their lives, pining for his lost kingdom. But in the interval he was silent, awkward and heavy with an emotion that could not find an outlet. He felt her hand close over his--an, almost anxious hand.

"Robert, you like it, don't you? You're not bored?" He turned to look dazedly at her, stammering in his confusion.

"I've never been to a theatre before."

"Never? Oh, my dear----"

"Only to a circus, long ago." He drew back hastily into himself. He did not want her to be sorry like that. He would not let her see how shaken he was. "I never wanted to go," he said.

After that they walked home together, and in the empty street that led into her square a moonlight spirit of phantasy seemed to possess her, and she sang under her breath and danced in front of him, rather solemnly as she had done as a little girl:

"Come unto these yellow sands And then take hands. . ."

He caught hold of her. Everything was unreal--they themselves and the unfamiliar street, painted with silver and black shadows.

"Don't--you're dancing away from me; there's nothing for you to dance to."

She smiled back wistfully.

"'The isle is full of noises, Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not. Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments Will hum about mine ears; and sometimes voices. . .'"

"I don't hear them," he muttered clumsily.

"Caliban heard them----"

"And you're Ariel," he said, with sudden, sorrowful understanding. "Ariel!"

From the steps of the dark house she looked down at him, her eager face smiling palely in the white, still light.

"Ariel wasn't a woman, dear duffer. You'll have to read it. I'll lend it to you. And then we'll go again."

He shook his head.

"No."

"Yes--often--often, Robert. We've been nearer to one another than ever before--just these last minutes--quite, quite close. We've got to find each other in pleasure too."

He rallied all his strength. He said stiffly, pompously:

"It's been awfully nice, of course. And thank you for taking me. But I don't really care for that sort of thing."

And for a moment they remained facing one another whilst the joy died out of her eyes, leaving a queer distress. Then they shook hands and he left her, coldly, prosaically, as though nothing had happened. But he was like a drunken man who had fallen into a sea of glory.

"The clouds, methought, would open, and show riches Ready to drop upon me. . ."

There was all that work that he had meant to do before morning. It seemed far off--more unreal and fantastic than a fairy tale. His heart and brain, ached with willingness and loathing.

". . . that, when I wak'd, I cried to dream again. . ."

He set his teeth. He clenched his hands till they hurt him.

"I'll have to keep away from all that," he thought aloud, "altogether--till I don't care any more."

IV

1

After all, Rufus Cosgrave had imagined his answers. Connie Edwards met Robert as he came out of the hospital gates and told him. It was raining dismally, with an ill-tempered wind blustering down the crowded street, and she had not dressed for bad weather. Perhaps she did not admit unpleasant possibilities even into her wardrobe. Perhaps she could not afford to do so. Her thin, paper-soled shoes, with the Louis XIV heels, and the cheap silk stockings which showed up to her knees, made her look like some bedraggled, long-legged bird-of-Paradise. A gaudy parasol could not protect her flopping hat, or her complexion, which had both suffered. Or she had been crying. But she did not sound as though she had been crying. She sounded breathless and resentful.

"He heard this afternoon," she said. "And what must he do but come bursting round to my place--half an hour before I'm due to start for the show--and carry on like a madman. Scared stiff, I was. Tried to make me swear I'd marry him and start for Timbuctoo to-morrow, and when I wouldn't, wanted to shoot himself and me too--as though I'd made a muck of things. Well, I'd done my best, and when it came to that sort of sob-stuff I'd had enough. What's he take me for? Get me into trouble with my landlady--making a row like that."

Robert heard her out in silence, and his intent, expressionless scrutiny seemed to flick her on the raw. She stamped her foot at him. "Oh, for the Lord's sake, get a move on---do something, can't you? I didn't come here to be stared at as though I were a disease!"

"Where is he?"

"If I knew----! My place probably--with the gas full on--committing suicide--making a rotten scandal. You've got to come and dig him out."

"Where do you live?"

"Ten minutes from here. 10E Stanton Place. I'll show you a short way. I ran like a hare, hoping I'd catch you, and you'd put a bit of sense into the poor looney's head. Serves me right--taking on with his sort."

"Well--we'd better hurry," Robert said.

"Thanks. I said I'd show you the way. I'm not coming in. Don't you believe it. I've had enough. All I ask is--get him out and keep him out."

"You're through with him?"

Her habitual good-natured gaiety was gone. She looked disrupted and savagely afraid, like an animal that has escaped capture by a frantic effort. And yet it was difficult to imagine Rufus Cosgrave capturing or frightening anyone.

"You bet I'm through with him. You tell him so--tell him I don't want to see him again--I won't be bothered----" She broke off, and added, with a kind of rough relenting: "Put it any blessed way you like--say what's true--we've had our good times together--and it seems they're over--we've no use for one another."

"You mean--now he's failed."

"What do _you_ mean--'now he's failed'? What's his rotten old exam got to do with me? I don't even know what it's about."

"You took the good time whilst you could get it, and now when you can't hope for anything more----"

She stopped short, and they faced each other with an antagonism that neither gave nor asked for quarter. They had always been enemies, and now that the gloves were off they were almost glad.

"So that's my line. Cradle-snatching. Vamping the helpless infant!" She burst into a fit of angry, ugly laughter. "A good time! Running round with a poor kid with ten shillings a week pocket-money--eating in beastly cheap restaurants--riding on the tops of 'buses when some girls I know are feeding at the Ritz and rolling round in limousines. That's what I get for being soft. And now because I won't shoot myself, or go off to nowhere steerage, I'm a bad, abandoned woman. What d'you take me for?"

"What you are," he said.

She went dead white under her streaky paint.

"You--you've got no right to say that. You're a devil--a stuck-up devil--I hate you--I'd have always hated you if I'd bothered to mind. I--I gave _him_ a good time. That's the truth. He was down and out when I met him, and I set him on his feet. I didn't mind what I missed--or the other girls guying me--I made him laugh and believe he had as good a chance in the world as anyone else. I put a bit of fun into him. I liked the kid. I--I like him now. If he wanted a good time to-morrow I'd run round with him again. But I'm no movie heroine--I'm not out for poison and funerals and slow music. Life's too damn serious for my sort to make a wail and a moan about it."

He stood close to her. He almost menaced her. He did in fact look dangerous enough with his white, set face and unflinching eyes in which stood two points of metallic light. If he had seen himself then he might have cowered away as from a ghost.

"I don't care a rap about you. I do care about my friend. You've got to stand by Cosgrave till he's over the worst."

"I won't--I won't!"

"I'll make you. You took him up. You made him think you cared about him. You're responsible----"

"I'm not--I won't be responsible; it's not my line. I've got myself to look after."

She had the look of someone struggling against an invisible entanglement--a pitiable, rather horrible look of naked purpose. She meant to cut free at whatever cost.

"You little beast!" he said.

He was sick with contempt. He swung away from her, and she stood in the middle of the pavement and called names after him like a drunken, furious street-girl. She did not seem to be even aware of the people who stared at her. When he was almost out of hearing, she added:

"Give him my love!" shrilly, vindictively, as though it had been a final insult. But he took no notice and now, at any rate, she was crying bitterly enough.

2

"E" proved to be the top room of No. 10, a dingy lodging-house whose front door, in accordance with the uncertain habits of its patrons, stood open from year's end to year's end. Robert went in unnoticed. He ran up the steep, narrow stairs, with their tattered carpeting, two steps at a time. A queer elation surged beneath his anger and distress. Cosgrave's failure was like a personal challenge--a defiance thrown in his teeth. The old fight was on again. It was against odds. But then, he had always fought against odds--won against them.

The room was Connie Edwards herself. It seemed to rush out at him in a tearing rage, flaunting its vulgar finery and its odour of bad scent and cheap cigarette smoke. It made him sick, and he brushed it out of his consciousness. He did not see the poor attempts to make it decent and attractive--the bed disguised beneath a faded Liberty cretonne, a sentimental Christ hanging between a galaxy of matinee heroes, nor a full-length woman's portrait, across which was scrawled "Gyp Labelle" in letters large enough to conceal half of her outrageous nakedness. There were even a few flowers, drooping forlornly out of a dusty vase, and a collection of theatrical posters, to lend a touch, of serious professionalism.

But the end of it all was a frowzy, hopeless disorder.

Cosgrave lay huddled over the littered table by the open window. The red untidy head made a patch of grotesque colour in the general murk. He looked like a poor rag doll that had been torn and battered in some wild carnival scrimmage and flung aside.

There was not much in him--not much fight, as he himself said. Not the sort to survive. Life was too strong--too difficult for him. He bungled everything--even an exam. It would be wiser, more consistent to let him drift. And yet at sight of that futile breakdown, it was not impatience or contempt that Robert felt, but a choking tenderness--a fierce pity. He had to protect him--pull him through. He had promised so much--he forgot when: that afternoon lying in the long, sooty grass behind the biscuit factory, or that night when he had dragged Cosgrave breathless and staggering in pursuit of the Greatest Show in Europe. It did not matter. It had become part of himself. And Cosgrave had always trusted him--believed in him.

"It's all right, old man; it's only me--Robert." For Cosgrave had leapt up with an eager cry, and now stood staring at him open-mouthed. The light was behind him, and the open mouth and blank, shadowy face made a queer, ghastly effect, as though a drowned man had suddenly stood up. Then he sagged pitifully, and Robert caught him by the shoulders and shook him with a rough, boyish impatience. "Don't be an idiot. It doesn't matter all that much. Exams are not everything. Everyone knows that. We'll find something else. If your people are too beastly, you'll come and share with us. I'll see you through--it'll be all right."

But a baffling change came over Cosgrave. He shook himself free. He stood upright, looking at Robert with a kind of stony dignity.

"Where is she?"

"Who?"

"Connie. She sent you, didn't she?"

"Yes. We met----"

"Where is she?"

"I don't know. Gone to the theatre probably."

"Isn't she coming back?"

"Not now."

"Didn't she send a message?"

"She said--it was finish between you. She's a little rotter, Cosgrave."

"She made me laugh," Cosgrave said simply. "I don't mind about the exam.--or about anything now. I suppose I was bound to fail. But I was so jolly happy. I'd never had a good time like that. It's all over now. She doesn't care. She said she couldn't be tied up with a lot of trouble. That's what I am. A lot of trouble. It was all bunkum--make-believe--to think I could be anything else."

So it wasn't his failure. It wasn't even the loss of a good-for-nothing chorus-girl. It was a loss far more subtle. The recognition of it lamed Robert Stonehouse, knocked the power out of him, as though someone had struck and paralysed a vital nerve centre. He could only stammer futilely:

"She's not worth bothering about."

Cosgrave slumped back into his chair. His hands lay on the table, half clenched as though they had let go and didn't care any more. He looked at Robert wide-eyed with a sudden absolute knowledge.

"That's it," he said. "Not worth bothering about--nothing in this whole beastly, rotten, world. . . . . ."

3

A convenient uncle found him a berth as clerk to a trading firm in West Africa, and with a cheap Colonial outfit and 10 pounds in his pocket, Cosgrave set out for the particular swamp which was to be the scene of his future career. He went docilely, with limp handshakes and dull, pathetic eyes. If he betrayed any feeling at all, it was a sort of relief at getting away from everybody. But emotionally he was dead--like cheap champagne gone flat, as he expressed it in one twisted mood of self-revelation.

Probably he was thinking of Connie Edwards and of their last spree together.

But he never spoke of her.

And it was very unlikely that the swamp would give him a chance to see any of them again.

After all, he had stood for something. He was a rudderless little craft that had come leaking and tumbling willy-nilly in the wake of the bigger vessel. But also he had been a sort of talisman. He had protected Robert as the weak, when they are humble and loving, can protect the strong, giving them greater confidence, making their defeat impossible. With his going went security. Little old fears came crawling out of their hiding-places. At night when Robert climbed the dark stairs to their stable-attic, they set upon him. They clawed his heart. He called to Christine before he saw her, and the answering silence made him sick with panic. It was reasonless panic, for Christine often fell asleep at dusk. She was difficult to wake and when she woke it was strangely, with a look of bewilderment, like a traveller who has come home after a long absence. Once she had spoken his father's name with a ringing joy, and he had answered roughly and had seen her shrink back into herself. Her little hands trembled, fumbling apologetically with the shabby bag she always carried. She was like a girl who, in one withering tragic moment, had become old. But his aching love found no outlet, no word of regret or tenderness. It recoiled back on himself in a dead weight of pain.

He began to watch himself like a sick man. There were hours when he knew his brain to be losing edge--black periods of hideous impotency which, when they passed, left him shaken and wet with terror. Supposing, at the end of everything, be failed? He didn't care so much. His very power of caring had been dissipated. His single purpose lost itself amidst incompatible dreams. He was being torn asunder--and there was a limit to endurance.

Cosgrave had failed. He couldn't concentrate. He was always looking for happiness. He had fallen in love and wasted himself and made a mess of his life.

It was mad to fall in love.

And yet the worst dread of all was the dread of losing Francey. It seemed even the most unreasonable, for they had their work in common and they loved one another. There was no doubting their love. They were very young and might have to wait, but he could trust her to wait all her life. He knew dimly that she had been fond of him as a little boy, and had gone on being fond of him, simply and unconsciously, because it was not possible for her to forget. She would love him in the same way. That steadfastness was like a light shining through the mists of her character--through her sudden fancies, her shadowy withdrawals.

And still he was afraid, and sometimes he suspected that she was afraid too. It was as though inexorable forces were rising up in both of them, essentially of them, and yet outside their control, two dark antagonisms waiting sorrowfully to join issue.

4

It had happened suddenly--not without warning. One little event trod on the heels of another, rubble skirling down the mountain-side, growing to an avalanche.

Or, again, Cosgrave might have been the odd, unlikely keystone of their daily life. He had not seemed to matter much, but now that he had been torn out the bridge between them crumbled.

It had been a day full of bitterness--of set-backs, which to Robert Stonehouse were like pointing fingers. They were the outward expressions of his disorder. He did not believe in luck, but in a man's strength or weakness, and he knew by the things that happened to him that he was weakening. A private operation had gone badly. He had bungled with his dressings, so that the surgeon had turned on him in a burst of irritation.

"Better go home and sleep it off, Stonehouse."

He had not gone. He would not admit that he was ill--dared not. All illness now meant the end of everything. It would wipe out all that they had endured if he were to break down now. It would kill Christine. She must not even guess.

He hung about the hospital common-room. The summer heat surging up from the burning pavements stagnated between the faded walls. He could not touch the food that he had brought with him. He was faint and sick, and the long table at which he sat, with its white blur of newspapers, rose and fell as though it were floating on an oily sea. But he held out. At five o'clock he was to meet Francey at the gates, and, as though she had some magic gift of relief, he strained towards that time, his head between his hands, his ears counting the seconds that dripped heavily, drowsily from the moon-faced clock.

And then she did not come. Outwardly it was only one more trifle, capable of simple explanations. But he saw it through a disfiguring haze of fever, and it was deadly in its significance. He hardly waited. He crossed the thoroughfare, and once in a side street stumbled into a shambling run. He did not stop until he reached her house. His former reluctance broke before the imperative need to see her and make sure of her. He stormed the broad, deep, carpeted stairs, pursued by a senseless panic, But at the top his strength failed him. He felt his brain throbbing in torture against his skull.

The old maid-servant nodded gravely, sympathetically.

"Yes, she's in, sir, but very busy--going away--sir." Going away. He wavered in the dim hall, trying to control his flying thoughts. Going away. And she had said nothing the night before--had not even warned him. Some unexpected, untoward event striking in the dark. Illness. A long separation. (And yet, he argued, he could not live without her. She had no people who could claim her. They were dead. No one to come between them. And there was her work. She would never leave that again.)

But there she stood in the midst of the disorder of a sudden going. Open suit-cases, clothes strewn about the floor, she herself in some loose, bright-coloured wrap, her brown hair tousled and her brows knit in perplexity. She stopped short at sight of him, smiling ruefully, her arms full.

"Oh, my dear--I'd forgotten." (Then she must have seen his face with its dead whiteness, for she added quickly, half laughing): "Not you. Only the time. I've not been at the hospital, and I thought I had still half an hour. I've had to run round like mad, and even now I've got a hundred things to do----"

He gulped. He said: "Where are you going?" in a flat, emotionless voice, as though he did not care.

For a moment she did not answer. She let the clothes drop, forgotten, on the sofa. He could see her weighing--considering what she should say to him.

"Italy--Rome--I expect----"

"Italy--when?"

"I've got to be at the hospital to-morrow. Wednesday probably. I don't believe it'll be for long. I hope not. A week or two. I've got leave for a month."

"Why are you going?"

And now he could not keep the harsh break out of his voice. He could not hide the physical weakness which made it impossible for him to stand. And yet, though she looked at him, she seemed unaware that he was suffering. She was absorbed in some difficulty of her own, set on her own immediate purpose. He knew that mood. It was the other side of her fitful, whimsical way of life that she could be as relentless, as deadly resolute and patient in attainment as himself.

"It's about Howard," she said, abruptly coming to a decision. "I wasn't sure at first what to do about it. I didn't want anyone to know. But you're different. We have to share things. Howard and Gertie--they've both gone--gone off--no one knows where."

"Together?"

"I'm pretty certain of it. At any rate, Gertie, who couldn't even pay her rent, has vanished, and Howard--I heard about Howard this morning."

"What did you hear about him?"

"It was from Salter. You probably don't know him. He came to me because he knew I was a friend of Howard's. He was frightfully upset. It seems there was some sort of club which a crowd of students were collecting for, and he and Howard held the funds. It wasn't much--150 pounds--and Howard drew it out two days ago."

"Does that astonish you?" Robert asked.

She seemed not to hear the scorn and irony of the question. She went on packing deliberately, and he watched her, not knowing what he would say or do. The tide was rising faster. His dread would carry him off his feet.

"No. I was sure things were coming to a crisis."

"He was no good. Anyone could see that."

"I didn't see it."

"Well, you see it now," he flung at her with a hard triumph.

"I don't."

"A mean thief----"

"Not mean, Robert."

"I don't know anything meaner than stealing money from a lot of hard-up students."

"There was Gertie," she said as though that were some sort of extenuation.

"Gertie--they've gone off on some rotten spree--not even married."

(He hated himself--the beastly righteousness of his voice, his contemptible exultation. It was as though he were under some horrid spell which twisted his love and anguish into the expressions of a spiteful prig. Why couldn't he tell her of those deadly, shapeless fears, of his loneliness, his sorrowful jealousies? He was shut up in the iron fastness of his own will--gagged and helpless.)

He saw her start. She stopped definitely in her work as though she were at last aware of some struggle between them. The room was growing dark, and she came a little nearer, trying to see his face.

"I don't suppose so. I don't think it would occur to them."

"No--that's what I should imagine."

"You're awfully hard on people, Robert."

"That sort of thing makes me sick. It ought to make you sick. I don't know why it doesn't. You don't seem to care--to have any standards. You're unmoral in your outlook--perhaps you're too young--you don't realize. A rotter like Howard who takes other people's money just to enjoy himself--a girl like Gertie Sumners who goes off with the first man who asks her----"

"You don't understand, Robert."

"No," he said with a laugh, "I don't."

"Gertie Sumners hasn't long to live. I sent her to the hospital last week, and they told her honestly. And she wanted so much to see Italy. I don't think Howard cares for her or she for him, except in a comradely sort of way. They loved the same things--and he was sorry--he wanted to give her her one good time."

"He told you all that, I suppose?"

"No," she answered soberly. "But I know."

He waited a moment. He was trying desperately to hold back--to stop himself. He was sorry about Gertie Sumners. But everything was against him. The room was against him--the faun dancing noiselessly among the shadows, the little things that Francey had gathered about her, the dear personal things that can become terrible in their poignancy, Francey herself, standing there slender and grave-eyed, judging him, weighing him. They were all leagued together. They spoke with one voice. "We belong TO one another. We understand. But you don't belong. You are outside."

"I don't see, at any rate," he said, "what it has got to do with you--or why you should be going away."

"I'm going after them. There's no one else. Howard will expect prosecution. He will think that he'll never be able to come home. He's pretty reckless, but they will be thinking of that all the time. It will spoil everything for them."

"And what can you do?"

"I can tell them it's all right."

"How can it be?"

"It is," she said curtly. "The money has been paid back."

"Paid back!" Understanding burst upon him. "_You_ paid it?"

He stood up. He knew that resentment flickered in her--a fine, dangerous resentment against him because he had dragged so simple and obvious a thing out of its insignificance. But his own anger was like a mad, runaway horse, rushing him to destruction.

"It was stupid of him not to have come to me in the first place," she said, with an effort. "He should have known----"

He broke in fiercely.

"You can't--can't go like that."

"I must. If they had left an address--but, of course, they haven't. I'll have to track them down. It won't be so difficult." A spark of gaiety lit up her serious eyes. "I'll find Gertie lying on her back in the Sistine Chapel. She'll scorn the mirrors."

"You can't leave your work like that."

"The hospital people have been awfully decent about it."

"You told them----?"

"I told them I had urgent, personal business."

"You told them a lie, then?"

(Steady. Steady. But it was too late. His only hope lay in her understanding--her pity.)

"It wasn't a lie. My friends are my business."

"Your friends!" he echoed.

There was silence between them. She was controlled enough not to answer. It would have been better if she had returned taunt for taunt so that at last in the white heat of conflict his prison might have melted and let him free. But there followed a cold, deadly interlude, in which their antagonism hardened itself with reason and bitterness. He went and stood by the window looking out on to the dim square. He said at last roughly, authoritatively:

"Don't go. I don't want you to go."

(If only he could have gone on--driven the words over his set lips--"because I'm afraid--because I'm at breaking-point--because I can't do without you. I'm frightened of life. I've been starved in body and heart too long. I'm frightened because Christine is hard to wake at night--because I can't work any more.")

"I've got to," she said briefly, sternly.

He walked from the window to the door.

"You don't care. You care more for these two than you do for me. I've lived hard and clean. I don't lie or steal. I've never thought of any girl but you. And you put me second to a feckless thief and a----"

She stopped him. Not with a word or gesture, but with the sheer upward blaze of a chivalrous anger. And it was not only anger. That would have been bearable. It was sorrow, reproach, a kind of grieving bewilderment, as though he had changed before her eyes.

"You'd--you'd better go, Robert. We're both of us out of hand. We'll see each other to-morrow. It will be different then."

He went without a word. But on the dark stairs he stood still, leaning back against the wall, his wet face between his hands. He said aloud: "Oh, Francey. Francey, I can't live without you!" He would have gone back to tell her, but he was physically at the end of everything, and at the mercy of the power outside himself. He thought:

"There's still to-morrow. I'll tell her everything. I'll help her to get away. I'll make her understand that it wasn't Howard. To-morrow it will be all right."

And so went on. And the stolid Georgian door closed with a hard metallic click, setting its teeth against him.

"Now you see how it happens, Robert Stonehouse!"

5

But he came out of a night of fever and hallucination with very little left but the will to keep on. Apathy, like a thin protecting skin, had grown over him, shielding him from further hurt. He did not want to feel or care any more. The very memory of that "scene" with Francey made him shrink with a kind of physical disgust. Only no more of that. Back to work--back to reason. If she wished to go in pursuit of Howard and Gertie she would have to go. It seemed strange to him now that he should have minded so desperately.

Christine called to him as he passed her door.

"Is that you, Robert? Have you had your breakfast? Wait, dear--I'll get it for you."

But he crept down the stairs as though he had not heard. Only not so much caring--if only he could forget that he cared.

"Good-bye, dearest, good-bye!"

Her voice followed him, plaintive and clear. It seemed to lodge itself in his heart so that ever afterwards he had only to think of her to hear it like the echo of a small, sad bell. He went on stubbornly, in silence.

He did not try to see Francey. They met inevitably in the wake of the surgeon on whose post they worked, but they did not speak. Their eyes avoided one another. Yet he could not forget her. It was not the old consciousness that had been full of mystery and delight. It hurt. He felt her unsapped joyous living like a blow on his own aching weariness. He thought bitterly of her. How easy life had been for her! She played at living. Her airy fancies, her belief in God, her vagrant tenderness for the rag and bobtail of the earth were all part of that same thing. She had never suffered. Her people had died, but they had died in the odour of sanctity and wealth. She had never had to ask herself: "If I fall out, what will become of us?" She saw pain and poverty through the softening veil of her own well-being. Nothing could really hurt her.

(And yet how lovable she was! He watched her covertly as she stood at the surgeon's elbow--a little graver than usual--a little paler. To-day there was no warm glance with a flicker of a smile in its serene depths to greet him. Her hands were thrust boyishly into the pockets of her white coat, and there was an air of austere earnestness about her that sat quaintly, charmingly upon her youth. He loved the businesslike simplicity of her dress--the dark, tailored skirt and white silk shirt--immaculate--expressive of her real ability, an accustomed wealth. He flaired and hated its expensiveness.)

Money. That lay at the root of everything. If she were ill--what would it matter? A mere set-back. Her work would wait for her. Money would wave anxiety from her door. So she was never ill. Even though she loved him and they had quarrelled she had kept her fresh skin and clear eyes. Even if she had worried a little, in the end she had slept peacefully. (He felt his own shabbiness, his exhaustion, his burning hands and eyes, his dry and bitter mouth like a sort of uncleanliness.)

And there in the midst of his jagged thoughts there flickered a red anger--a desire to hurt too, to strike, to come to grips at last with her laughing philosophy of life--to tear it down and batter it into the dust and misery in which he stood.

They had come to No. 10's bedside. Things had gone badly with No. 10. She had stood a successful operation, but there had been severe haemorrhage, and, as Robert had said, there was no constitution to fight at the turning point. Her face just showed above the creaseless sheet. Death had already begun to clear away the mask of vice and cynicism and a lost prettiness peered through. But the eyes were terribly alive and old. So long as they kept open there could be no mistaking her. They travelled from face to face, and sought and questioned. Her voice sounded reedy and far-off.

"Not going this trip, am I, doctor?"

Rogers patted the bed.

"Certainly not. Going along fine. What do you expect to feel like--with a hole like that in your inside? Next time you have a young man, see he doesn't carry firearms."

One of the eyes tried to wink--pitifully, obscenely.

"You bet your life. Don't want to die just yet."

"Nobody does."

They drew a little apart. Rogers consulted with his colleague. The serious loss of blood must be made good. A transfusion. There was a young man who had offered himself. A suitable subject. This afternoon at the latest.

They moved on. Robert spoke to the man next him. But he knew that Francey heard him. He meant her to hear.

"It's crazy. They ought to be glad to let a woman like that slip out. If she lives she'll only infect more people with her rottenness. She's better dead. Instead of that they'll suck out somebody else's vitality to save her. The better the life the more pleased they'll be to risk it. This sacrificing the strong to the weak--a snivelling sentimentality."

The man he spoke to glanced at him curiously--it was not usual for Robert Stonehouse to speak to anyone--and said something about the medical profession and the sanctity of life. Robert laughed. He argued it over with himself. It was true. For that matter Howard and Gertie and Connie would all be better dead. There was no use or purpose in their living. Only sentimentalists like Francey wanted to patch them up and keep them on their feet.

People who cluttered up life ought to be cleared out of it.

He felt light-headed, yet extraordinarily sure of himself again. He answered Rogers' questions with the old lucidity. And presently he found himself in the corridor, still arguing his theme over. He would prove to Francey that she must let Howard and Gertie go to the devil and they would never quarrel again.

He came to the head of the stairs where they met after the morning's work.

The steps were very broad and white and shallow, and gave the impression of great distance. Mr. Ricardo, at the bottom of them, was a black speck--a bird that had blundered into the building by mistake and beaten itself breathless against the walls. As he saw Robert he began to drag himself up, limping. He seemed to shrivel then to a mere face, stricken and yellow, that gaped and mouthed.

Robert did not move. He stood leaning against the balustrade. It was as though an iron fist had smashed through the protecting wall about him, letting in a rush of bitter wind.

"Robert--Robert!"

He nodded.

"I'm coming----"

For he had known instantly.

6

The tragic journey through the streets was over. They stood beside her. Robert knew too much to struggle, but Ricardo's voice went on, saying the same things over and over again, pleading.

"Do something--do something. Wake her, Robert, dear boy, for God's sake. What is the use of all your studying if you can't even wake her?"

"It's no use," he said.

"She was sitting there--I was to have read her the last chapter--she was so quiet--asleep she seemed---for an hour--I sat--not moving--then I was afraid!"

Robert nodded.

She had laid his supper for him. It was much too early for her to have laid it. She had spread muslin over the bread and cheese. And then she had sat down quietly in her chair by the window and waited. (How long had she waited there? Many years perhaps. It had been very lonely for her.) Her head was thrown back a little, and her closed eyes lifted to the light that came over the stable roofs. The grey hair hung in wisps about the transparent face--very still, as though the air had died too. She had changed profoundly, indefinably. She looked younger, and there was a new serenity about the faintly opened mouth. Her hands lay peacefully on the little shabby bag. Her little feet in the ill-fitting shoes just reached the ground. In a way it was all so familiar. And yet he felt that if he touched her he would find out that this was not Christine at all. This was something that had belonged to her--as poignant, as heart-rending as a dress that she had worn.

"Robert, isn't there anything--to do?"

"No."

They had nothing to say to one another. They had made a strange trio--lonely and outcast by necessity--but now a link had snapped and it was all over. They stood apart, each by himself. Ricardo, crouching against the window-sill, pressed his hand to his side as though he were hurt and bleeding to death. He said, almost inaudibly:

"I've no one. Nobody will ever listen. She believed in me. She was sure that one day--I would go out--and tell the truth. She knew I wasn't--a cowardly--beaten, old man."

Robert could not touch her whilst Ricardo stood there crying. Her repose was too dominating. And if he touched her something terrible and incalculable might happen. He felt as though he were standing on the edge of a precipice, and that suddenly he might let go and pitch over.

It had come true at last--his boy's nightmare that had grown up with him--that only waited for darkness to show itself. Christine had left him. She was dead, and it seemed that he had no one in the world. For Francey, loving him as she did, had failed him. But Christine had never failed him. Never at any time had she asked, "Are you a good little boy, Robert?" It would never have occurred to her. She was so sure. She had loved him and, believed in him unfalteringly, and, in her quiet way, died for him.

Ricardo drew himself up. He plucked at Robert's sleeve. A change had come over him in the last minutes. His sunken brown eyes had dried and become rather terribly alert. Something too fine--too exquisitely balanced in him had been disturbed and broken beyond hope.

"It proves what I have suspected for a long time, Robert. You know it's not a light thing to make an enemy like that. He's taken his time, but you see in the end he has taken everything I had. First he made me a liar and a hypocrite. Then he took you. He sent that girl specially to come between us. And now Miss Christine. I suppose he thinks that's done for me. But it's a great mistake to make people desperate, Robert. You should always leave them some little thing that they care for and which makes them cowards. Now, you see, I simply don't care any more. I don't care for myself or even my poor sister. I'm going to fight him in the open, gloves off. I'll wrestle with him and prevail. I'll give blow for blow. I'm going now to Hyde Park to tell people the truth about him. They take him altogether too lightly, Robert. They're inclined to laugh at him as of no account. That's a great mistake, too. I shall warn them." He nodded mysteriously. "God is a devil--a cruel, dangerous devil."

Then he bent and kissed Christine's hand, very solemnly and tenderly, as some battered, comical Don Quixote might have done before setting out on a last fantastic quest. And presently Robert heard him patter down the narrow stairs and over the cobbles to the open street.

They were alone now. He bent over her and said: "Christine--Christine," reassuringly, so that she should not be afraid, and gathered her in his arms. How little she was--no heavier than a child--and cold. Her grey head rested against his shoulder. If she had only stirred and laughed, and said: "Your father was strong too!" he would have answered gently. He would have been glad that the memory of his father could make her happy. But it was all too late.

He carried her into her room. It was like her to have left it so neat and ordered--each thing in its place--her out-door shoes standing decorously together under the window, and her best skirt peeping out from behind the cretonne curtain. Her hair-brush, with the comb planted in its bristles, lay exactly in the middle of the pine-wood dressing-table. When she had put it there, she had not known that it was for the last time.

Or had she known? She had called out to him so insistently. She had wanted to say good-bye. And he had gone on, not answering.

They said that people, at the end, saw their whole life pass before them. Perhaps she had seen hers. Perhaps she had trodden the old road that he was travelling over now. Only her vision of it would be different. It was James Stonehouse and Robert's mother that she would see--radiant figures of wonderful, unlucky people--and little Robert, who belonged to both of them, tagging in the rear.

But he saw her--Christine lying white and still under the great mahogany side-board, Christine coming back day after day in gallant patience to scrub the floors and his ears, and pay the bills and chase away the duns, and do whatever was necessary to keep the staggering Stonehouse menage on its feet.

She had held him close to her and comforted him.

Her splendid faithfulness.

He laid her on the narrow bed against the wall, and smoothed her dress and folded her hands over her breast. Her bag, which he had gathered up with her rolled on to the floor. A book fell out. He picked it up mechanically. It was a little Bible, and on the fly-leaf was written:

"From JIM and CONSTANCE to their friend, CHRISTINE."

The writing was his father's. It had faded, but one could still see how regular and beautiful it was. Then the date. His own birthday--the first of all the unfortunate birthdays.

He looked at it for a long time, stupidly, not realizing. Then suddenly he saw it--in a new light. Ricardo. How frightfully--excruciatingly funny. Ricardo. He felt that he was going to laugh--shout with laughter. It was horrible. Laughter rising and falling---like a sort of awful sickness--choking him.

Instead his heart broke. He flung himself down beside her and pressed his face against her cold, thin cheek. And, instead of laughter, sobs that tore him to pieces--and at last, in mercy, tears.

"Oh, Christine, Christine--my own darling! I did love you--I never told you--you never, never knew how much!"

The earth-old cry of unavailing, inevitable remorse.

7

So there was no one but Francey now.

He did not know what he hoped, or indeed if he hoped for anything. He turned to her instinctively. And when the door of the ward opened he did, in fact, feel a faint lifting of the flat indifference which had followed on that one difficult rending surrender. He went to meet her. If she had looked at him with her usual straightness, she might have remembered the boy of whom she had been fond--a small, queer boy, who did not like having his face washed, and who came to her truculent and swaggering, with smears under his red eyes.

Even then it is doubtful whether she could have changed the course on which both of them were set.

He did not want her to see. And yet, unknown to himself, he did count on her instant understanding, on some releasing, quickening word or look that would give back life to the dead thing in him. But her eyes, preoccupied and unhappy, avoided him. He could not have appealed to her. He could not have said, as he had meant to do, "Christine is dead." He was silenced by the certain knowledge that all real communication between them had been broken off.

"No. 10 is going to pull through," she said.

They walked slowly down the corridor. He found it difficult to keep his feet. He wondered vaguely why she should talk of No. 10 when Christine was dead. He was puzzled---confused.

"It seemed likely," he muttered. "Rogers had got his teeth into her."

"I suppose you think he was a fool to try?"

(What was she talking about? He would have to arrange for the funeral. And the money. He did not know whether there would be money enough. It was hideous--to think of a thing like that--to have to go into a shop and say to some bored shopkeeper: "I want a nice cheap coffin, please." For Christine--for whom he had never been able to buy so much as a bunch of flowers.)

"I--I don't know."

"You see, I heard what you said."

(What had he said? He tried to remember. No. 10. Better dead. Yes, of course that was it. He couldn't go back on that. His mind seemed to strain and stagger under the challenge like a half-dead horse under the whip.)

"She didn't hear me, anyway."

"I want to know--was it just--just a sort of pose--or did you mean it?"

"It was true."

"That doesn't seem to me to matter. It was a beastly thing to have thought--beastlier to have said----"

He stopped short, as though she had struck him across the face. For an instant he was blind with pain, but afterwards he steadied, grew deadly cool and clear-headed. There was a constant movement in the corridor and he turned abruptly, almost with authority, into an empty operating theatre. Instinctively he had chosen his ground. Here was symbolized everything that he trusted and believed in--a cool, dispassionate seeking, the ruthless cutting out of waste. Yet in the half-light the place surrounded them both with a ghostly, almost sinister unreality. Its stark immaculateness lay like a chill, ironic hand on their distress. It made mock of their unhappiness. It divested them of their humanity. The nauseating sweetness that still lingered in the sterilized air was like incense offered up on the grotesque sacrificial altar that stood bare and brutal beneath the glass-domed roof.

And now Robert saw Francey's face. It was white and pinched and unfamiliar, as though all her humour and whimsical laughter and loving-kindness had been twisted awry in a bitter fight with pain. But he knew her eyes of old. Long ago he had seen them with the same burning deadly anger. And he knew that it was all over. Their patient antagonism had come to grips at last over the bodies of their suffering love for one another.

Even then she held back.

"You don't know how hard life can be. It was hard for her----" But at that he burst out laughing, and she added quickly, reading his thought: "Nothing that you've gone through is of any use if it hasn't taught you pity."

"Your pity would take a half-dead rat from a terrier."

"You have no right to judge," she persisted.

He smiled with white lips.

"Oh, yes, I have! We all have. We condemn men to prison--to death."

"You do believe in God," she said bitterly. "You believe in yourself."

"It comes to this, Francey, doesn't it? You're through with me? You don't care any more?"

Her eyes narrowed with a kind of desperate humour. It was as though for a moment she had regained her old vision of him--a sad queer little boy.

"You say that because you want to shirk the truth. You're almost glad--presently you will be very glad. You never did want to care--not from the first. Caring got in your way. You will be free now." She waited, and then added very quietly, without anger: "I love you. I dare say I always shall--but I couldn't live with you--it would break my heart if we should come to hate one another. Don't think any more about it. I'll have gone to-morrow, and I'll try to arrange not to come back till you're through. It will be all right."

"Francey, it's such a foolish thing to quarrel about."

"It's everything," she said simply.

She turned to go. Even then he could have stopped her. He could have said: "Francey, Christine died this morning!" and their sad enmity might have melted in grief and pity. But what she had said was true. It was everything. And his reason, his will, rising up out of the general ruin, monstrous and powerful, stood like an admonishing shadow at his elbow.

"It's much better. There's nothing to make a coward of you now. You're free."

He half held out his hand, but it was only a convulsive, dying movement. He let her go.