What he did with himself during the long hours when Stonehouse was in his consulting-room or on his rounds Stonehouse never asked.  At night he sat at the study window of his friend’s flat (shabby and high up since all spare money was diverted to other and better purposes), and looked over the roofs of the houses opposite, smoking and watching the dull red glow that rose up from the blazing theatres westwards.

“It is a fire,” he said once, “and all the cold, tired people in London come to warm their hands at it.”

Robert Stonehouse went on with his writing under the lamplight.

“Are you cold?”

“Not now.”  He added unexpectedly:  “You think I’d be all right, don’t you, if only you could have a go at my tonsils or my adenoids?  I believe you’re just waiting to have a go at them.”

“Your tonsils are septic,” Stonehouse agreed gravely.  “I told you so, but I wouldn’t advise anything drastic until you’re stronger.  We’ll think about it in a month or two.  You’re better already.”

Cosgrave chuckled to himself.  In the shadow in which he sat the chuckle sounded elfish and almost mocking.

“Oh, yes, I’m better!”

Stonehouse took his first holiday for three years, and carried Cosgrave off with him to a rough shooting-box in the Highlands lent him by a grateful and sporting patient, and for a week they tramped the moors together and stalked deer and fished in the salmon river that ran in and out among the desolate hills.  The place was little more than a shepherd’s cottage, growing grey and stubborn as a rock out of the heather, and beyond that proffered them occasionally by a morose and distrustful gillie they had no help or other companionship.  They won their food for themselves, cooked it by the smoking fire, and washed heroically in the icy river water.  A sting of winter was already in the wind and a melancholy and bitter rain swept the hills, giving way at evening to unearthly sunsets.  They saw themselves as pioneers at the world’s end.  And Stonehouse, who had calculated its effect on Cosgrave, was himself caught up in the fierce, rough charm of that daily life.  He who had never played since that circus night played now in passionate earnest.  He proved a good shot, and, for all his inexperience, an indomitable and clever hunter.  His close-confined physical energy could not shake itself.  He liked the long and dogged pursuit, the cruel, often fruitless struggle up the mountain-sides, the patient waiting, the triumph of that final shot from a hand unshaken by excitement or fatigue.  A stag showing itself for an instant against the sky-line called up all the stubborn purpose in him; then he would not turn back until either his quarry had fallen to him, or night had swallowed them both.