And Cosgrave, half forgotten, tagged docilely at his heels, or lay in the wet heather on the crest of a hill overlooking the world, and watched and waited with strange, wide-open eyes.  But he never gave the signal.  He shot nothing.  His failure seemed to amuse and even please him.  A faint, excited colour came into his cheeks, lashed up by the wind and rain.  And once, a hare running out from under his feet, he gave a wild “halloo!” like a boy and set off in pursuit, headlong down the stony hillside, his gun at full cock, threatening indiscriminate destruction.

“You might have killed yourself,” Robert said angrily.  But Cosgrave laughed, his eyes narrowed to blue-grey slits as though he did not want Stonehouse to see all that was in them.

“I shouldn’t have minded,” he panted, “going off on the crest like that—­I wanted to run—­I forgot.”

“Well, for the Lord’s sake, don’t forget.”

But for an instant at least he knew what Cosgrave meant.  It had been the sight of that downward rushing hill and the sudden choking exultation.  He had felt it too—­that night in Acacia Grove in pursuit of the Greatest Show—­and once again.  He could smell the scent of the trees and the young grass blowing in his face.

And at the bottom there had been a mysterious wood like a deep, green pool.

Then on the eighth day Cosgrave disappeared.  He had set out in the early morning for the nearest station to fetch their letters and fresh provisions, and at dusk a village youth reached Stonehouse with a note which had been scrawled in such haste that it was almost illegible.  It was as though Cosgrave had yielded suddenly and utterly to a prolonged pressure.

He had to go back to town.  It was something urgent.  Stonehouse was not to bother.  He would be all right now.

The next day Stonehouse stalked and brought down his first “Royal.”  This time the chase had cost him every ounce of his endurance, and in the chill dusk he stood watching the gillie at his work on the lovely body (still so warm and lissom that one could almost see the last sorrowful heaving of its golden flanks) with a kind of stolid triumph as though now he had wiped out that other failure, for he realized that he had been both too sanguine and too impatient.  When you were angling a man with a sick brain back to health, you had to go slowly—­delicately.

“It’s because I care,” he thought, half amused and half angry.  “And why do I care?  It’s as he said—­a rotten habit.”

But he returned to town.  He tracked Cosgrave to his former lodging-house, where a stout, heavily-breathing landlady showed every readiness to be communicative and helpful.

“Yes, sir—­he’s here again—­I think he was expecting you—­mentioned your name—­he’s out now and won’t be back till late—­dinner at the Carlton, he said.  If you’d like to leave a note, sir——­”

She led him upstairs and watched him with a fat amusement as he stood silent and frowning on the threshold.