They stepped back from the crowd into the shelter of the Piccadilly Tube.  They had been walking the streets for an hour, and as much of their lives as they were able to tell one another had been told.  Now they were both baffled and tired out.  Of what had really happened to them they could say nothing, and their memories, disinterred in a kind of desperate haste ("Do you remember that row with Dickson about my hair, Robert?”) had crumbled, after a moment’s apparent vitality, into a heap of dust.  It was all too utterly dead—­too unreal to both of them.  The things that had mattered so much, which had seemed so laughable or so tragic, were like the repetition of a story in which they could only force a polite interest.  Their laughter, their exclamations, sounded shallow and insincere.

And yet it was borne in upon them that they did still care for one another.  They had had no other friendship to compare with this.  Strictly speaking, there had been no other friends.  There had been acquaintances—­people whom you talked to because you worked with them.

Robert Stonehouse had always known his own loneliness.  His patients believed in him; his colleagues respected him.  Their knowledge of him went no further than the operating theatre where they knew him best.  He had reckoned loneliness as an asset.  But to feel it, as he felt it now beneath this stilted exchange, was to become aware of a dull, stupid pain.  He found himself staring over the heads of the people, and wishing that Cosgrave had never come back.  And Cosgrave said gently, as though he had read his thought and had made up his mind to have done with insincerities: 

“You’re not to bother about me, Robert.  It’s been jolly, seeing you again and all that, but we’d better let it end here.  It always puzzled me—­your caring, you know, about a hapless fellow like myself.  It’s against your real principles.  I’m a dead weight.  I couldn’t give anyone a solitary water-tight reason for my being alive.  I think you did it because you’d got your teeth into me by accident and couldn’t let go.  I don’t want you to get your teeth into me again.”

“I don’t believe,” Stonehouse said, with an impatient laugh, “that I ever let go at all.”

His attention fixed itself on the illuminated sign that hung from the portico of the Olympic Theatre opposite, and mechanically he began to spell out the flaming letters: 

“Gyp Labelle—­Gyp Labelle!” At first the name scarcely reached his consciousness, but in some strange way it focused his disquiet.  It was as though for a long time past he too had been indefinitely ill, and now at an exasperating touch the poisoned blood rushed to a head of pain.  He felt Cosgrave plucking at his sleeve, fretfully like a sick child, raised to a sudden interest.

“I say, Stonehouse, don’t you remember?”

“The Circus?  Yes, I was just thinking about it.  It’s not likely to be the same though.”