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.