“Well, as long as you posted the fourth effort,” Stonehouse said, “it’s all right.”

They fell then unexpectedly into one of those difficult silences which beset the road of friends who have been separated too long.  The past stood at their elbow like an importunate and shabby ghost.  And yet it was all they had to lead them back into the old intimacy.

“We’ve got too much to say,” Cosgrave broke out at last, with a painful effort, “too much ground to cover—­and I dare say we don’t want to cover it.  If we’d written—­but I never heard from you after that one letter—­after Miss Christine’s death.”

“I was ill,” Stonehouse explained, eating tranquilly.  “I got through my finals with a temperature which would have astonished my examiners, and then I went to pieces altogether.  Had to go into hospital myself.  A nervous breakdown.  Three months I had of it.  They were very decent to me, and when I came out they got me a berth as ship’s doctor on one of the smaller transatlantic liners.  I got hold of things again and pulled them my way.  But I didn’t want to look back.  My illness had made a definite break—­I wanted to keep free.”

Cosgrave nodded.  He had been playing with his food, and now a look of disgust and weariness came into his thin face.

“I can understand that.  I suppose it would have been better if I’d left well alone, and not written at all.”

“It wouldn’t have made much difference,” Stonehouse said:  “A week or two.  Sooner or later we’d have run into one another.  People who’ve been at school together always seem to.  And you and I especially.”

“I don’t know.  I was always a poor specimen—­I never meant much to you.”

Stonehouse looked up at him and smiled.  This time it was an unmistakable smile and rather charming, like a warm line of light falling across his face.

“I was awfully glad to get your letter,” he said.  “I’d begun to worry rather.”

Cosgrave flushed up.

“That’s—­that’s about the nicest thing that’s happened to me for a long time.  I’d probably cry with pleasure—­only I don’t seem able to feel much anyway.  It’s those damn bugs, I suppose!”

“I’ll pull you out of that.”

“Got me diagnosed already?”

“It’s not very difficult.”

“I suppose—­I suppose you’re an awful swell, Stonehouse.”

“Not yet.  I’m better at my job than a great many men who are swells.  But I’m young—­that’ll cure itself.  Oh, yes—­I’m all right.  Things have gone on coming my way.  I’ll tell you about it sometime.”

Cosgrave’s eyes had rounded with their old solemn admiration.

“A fashionable West-End surgeon—­oh, my word!  I say, have you got a bed-side manner tucked away somewhere?”

“No.  That’s not fashionable for one thing, and for another, it wouldn’t suit my style.  I’m not interested in people.  I’m interested in their diseases.  They know it, and rather like it.”  A touch of chill scorn showed itself for a moment in his face.  “They’re frightened of me.  I’m as good as an electric shock to their lethargic, overfed carcasses.  They can’t get over a young man with his way to make who wipes his boots on them.  They have to come back for more.”