And that was what she had said. Stonehouse made no answer. He saw himself as ridiculous and futile. He was sick with disgust at his own pain. If he had lost Cosgrave he wanted to have done with the whole business now—quickly and once and for all.
There was a sense of finality in the shabby room. The invisible bond that had held them through eight years of separation and silence had given way. It was almost a physical thing. It checked and damped down Cosgrave's excitement so that he said almost calmly:
"Well, I shan't attempt to see her again. You'll have that satisfaction. I'll get out of here—back to my jolly old swamp, where there aren't any beastly women—decent or indecent—only mosquitoes."
He waited a moment, as though trying hard to finish on a warmer, more generous note. Perhaps some faint flicker of recollection revived in him. But it could only illuminate a horrifying indifference. He went out without so much as a "good-night."
The morning papers gave the Kensington House incident due prominence.
It was one more feather in Mademoiselle Labelle's outrageous head-gear.
The Olympic had not so much as standing room for weeks after.
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.