Cosgrave kept his word.  He did not see her again, and within a week he had sailed for West Africa—­to die.  But ten days later Stonehouse received a wireless, and a month later a letter and a photograph of a fair-haired, tender-eyed, slightly bovine-looking girl in evening dress.  It appeared that she was a Good Woman and the daughter of wealthy and doting parents, and that in all probability West Africa would see Rufus Cosgrave no more.

So that was the end of their boyhood.  Cosgrave had saved himself—­or something outside Stonehouse’s strength and wisdom had saved him.  They would meet again and appear to be old friends.  But the chapter of their real friendship, with all its inarticulate romance and tenderness, was closed finally.

Stonehouse kept the photograph on the table of his consulting-room.  He believed that it amused him.

3

Still he could not work at night.  He resumed his haunted prowlings through the streets.  But he took care that he did not pass Francey Wilmot’s house again.  He knew now that he was afraid.  He was ill, too, with a secret, causeless malady that baffled him.  There were nights when he suffered the unspeakable torture of a man who feels that the absolute control over all his faculties, which he has taken for granted, is slipping from him, and that his whole personality stands on the verge of disintegration as on the edge of a bottomless pit.

For some weeks he hunted for Mr. Ricardo in vain.  He tried all the favoured spots which a considerate country sets aside for its detractors and its lunatics so that they may express themselves freely, without success.  Mr. Ricardo seemed to have taken fright and vanished.  But one afternoon, returning from the hospital, Stonehouse met him by accident, and followed him.  He made no attempt to speak.  He meant, this time, to find out where the old man lived, and, if possible, to come to his assistance, and his experience taught him the danger and futility of a direct approach.  He followed therefore at a cautious distance that it was not always possible to maintain.  Although it was early in the afternoon a dense but drifting fog wrapped the city in its dank folds, and the figure in front of him sometimes loomed up like a distorted shadow and then in a moment plunged into a yellow pocket of obscurity, and was lost.  Then Stonehouse could only listen for his footfalls, quick and irregular, echoing with an uncanny loudness in the low vault of the fog.

Mr. Ricardo had evidently been speaking, for he carried the soap-box slung over his shoulder, and he was in a great hurry.  It was extraordinary how fast the lame, half-starved old man could walk.

They crossed the park and over to Grosvenor Place.  There was no doubt that Mr. Ricardo knew where he was going, but it flashed upon Stonehouse that he was not going home.  There was something pressed and sternly in earnest about the way he hurried, as though he had some important appointment to keep and knew that he was already late.  Once Stonehouse had to run to keep him within hearing.