She pretended to shudder, and a moment later seemed to forget him altogether.  She pressed her cigarette out on her plate and went over to the piano, touching Cosgrave lightly on the shoulder as she passed him.

“Come, my latest best-beloved, we ’ave to amuse ze company.  We sing our leetle song together.”

But first she made a deep low bow to the shadowy theatre.  She kissed her fingers to the empty boxes that stared down at her with hollow, mournful eyes. (Were there ghosts there too, Stonehouse wondered bitterly?  The unlucky Frederick, perhaps, with the fatal hole gaping above the temple, applauding, leaning towards her!)

She sang worse than usual.  She was hoarse, and what voice she had gave way altogether.  It did not seem to matter either to her or to anyone else.  What she could not sing she danced.  There was a chorus and they joined in filling the gloom behind them with sullen, ironic echoes.  She reduced them all, Stonehouse thought, to the cabaret from which she sprang.

And it was comic to see Cosgrave with his head thrown back, playing the common, noisy stuff as though inspired.

When it was over he swung round, gaping at them with drunken, confidential earnestness.

“You know, when I was a kid I used to see myself—­on a stage like this—­playing the Moonlight Sonata.”

She rumpled up his thick hair so that it stood on end like Loga’s names.

“You play my song ver’ nice.  And that is much better than playing ze Moonlight Sonata all wrong, my leetle friend.”

3

It was a sort of invisible catastrophe.

No one else knew of it.  In the day-time he himself did not believe in it—­did not, at first, think of it at all.  It had all the astonishing unreality of past pain.  He went his way as usual, was arbitrary and cocksure with his patients, and looked forward to the evening when he could put them out of his mind altogether and give himself to his vital work.  For the hospital had become a fact.  It stood equipped and occupied, an unrecognized but actual witness to his tenacity.  Other men would get the credit.  The Committee who had appointed him consulting surgeon, not without references to his unusual youth and their own daring break with tradition—­had no suspicion that even the fund which, in a fit of inexplicable far-seeingness they had allotted to research, had been created under his ceaseless pressure.  And not even in his thoughts was he satirical at their expense.  They had provided the money and done what he wanted and so served their purpose.  Among his old colleagues he bore himself confidently but unobtrusively.  He could afford to pay them an apparent deference.  He was going farther than they were.  His eyes were fixed on a future far beyond the centres of their jealousies and ambitions when he would be freed from the wasteful struggle with petty ailments and petty people, and the last pretence of being concerned with individual life.  It was a time of respite and revision.  He was young—­in his profession extraordinarily young—­and he was able to look back, as a mountaineer looks back from his first peep over the weary foothills, knowing that the bitter drudgery is past and that before him lies the true and splendid adventure.