“Honour bright, I didn’t.  I believe I did a lot better, really.  You know, I’m so awfully happy to-night I’d believe anything.  It’s queer how this old river fits in with one’s moods, isn’t it?  Last time we were here I wanted to drown myself, and there it was ready to hand, as it were—­offering eternal oblivion—­and all that.  I thought of all the other fellows who had drowned themselves, and felt no end cheered up.  And now it makes me think of escape—­of getting away from everything—­sailing to strange, new countries——­”

“The last time you were here,” Stonehouse said, “you’d just come out of the exam.  If you really answered as you say you did, there was no reason for your wanting to drown yourself.”

“But I did.  You’re such a distrustful beggar.  You think I just imagine things.  No, I’ll tell you what it was—­I didn’t care.  There I was—­I’d swotted and swotted.  I’d thought that if only I could squeeze through I’d be the happiest man on earth.  And then, when it was all over I began to think:  ‘What’s it all for, what’s it all about?  What’s the good?’ Suppose I have passed, I’ll get some beastly little job in some stuffy Government office, 200 pounds a year, if I’m lucky.  And then if I’m good and not too bright they’ll raise me to 250 pounds in a couple of years’ time, and so it’ll go on—­nothing but fug, and dinge, and skimping, and planning—­with a fortnight at the seaside once a year or a run over to Paris.  I suppose it was good enough for our grandfathers, Stonehouse—­this just keeping alive?  But it didn’t seem good enough to me.  Don’t you feel like that sometimes—­when you think of the time when you’ll be able to stick M.D., or whatever it is, after your name—­as though, after all, it didn’t matter a brace of shakes?”

Robert Stonehouse roused himself from his lounging attitude and thrust his hands deep into his trousers pockets.  There was a nip in the wind, and he had no overcoat.

“No.  When I’ve got through this next year I shall feel that I’ve climbed out of a black pit and that the world’s before me—­to do what I like with.”

“Well—­you’re different.”  Cosgrave sighed, but not unhappily.  “You’re going to do what you want to do, and I expect you’ll be great guns at it.  I dare say if I were to play the piano all day long—­decently, you know, as I do sometimes, inside me at any rate—­and get money for it, I’d think it worth while——­ But it takes a lot to make one feel that way about a Government office.”

His voice was quenched by a sudden rush of traffic—­a tram that jangled and swayed, a purring limousine full of vague, glittering figures, and a great belated lorry lumbering in pursuit like an uncouth participant in some fantastic race.  They roared past and vanished, and into the empty space of quiet there flowed back the undertones of the river, solitary footfalls, the voice of the drowsing city.  The loneliness became something magical.  It changed the colour of Cosgrave’s thoughts.  He pressed closer to his companion, and, with his elbows on the balustrade and his hands clenched in his hair, spoke in an awed whisper.