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.