uses opposite, and
Delavoye dashed out again to catch his train, like the desperate leader
of a forlorn hope, leaving his dark eyes burning before mine and his
wild words ringing in my ears.

Quite apart from the point on which he was never sane, he seemed to have
lost the otherwise level head on which I had learnt to rely at any
crisis; but Coplestone still kept his, and him I admired more and more.
He still took his exercise like a man, refrained from harrying nurse or
doctor, showed an untroubled face by the sick-bed, but avoided the room
more and more, and altogether during the terrible delirious stages.

"If I were to stay there long," he said to me once, "I should make a
scene. I couldn't help it. There are more things than one to cloud your
mind, and I've got to keep mine unclouded all the time."

He kept it very nearly serene; and his serenity was not the numbness of
despair which sometimes wears the same appearance; for I do not think
there was a moment at which Coplestone despaired. He had much too stout
a heart. There was nothing forced or unnatural in his manner; his
feelings were not deadened for an instant, yet not for an instant would
he give them rein. Only, our sober vigils cut deeper lines than his
excesses before Christmas, and every night left him a hard year older.

We spent them all downstairs in his study. Neither of us was a
chess-player, and I was all unversed in cards, but sometimes we played
draughts or dominoes by the hour, as though one of us had been Ronnie
himself. Often we talked of him, but never as though there were any
question of his eventual recovery. Coplestone would only go so far as to
bemoan the probability of an entirely lost hockey term, and his eye
would steal round to the photograph of last year's hockey eleven at
Ronnie's little school, in a place of honour on the mantelpiece, where
indeed it concealed one of his own most heroic trophies.

Fitted and proportioned like half a hundred others on the Estate, that
study of Coplestone's is one of those Witching Hill interiors that time
cannot dismantle in my mind. It was filled with the memorials of a
brilliant boyhood. There were framed photographs of four Cambridge
crews, of two Eton eights, of the Eton Society with Coplestone to the
fore in white trousers, of the "long low wall with trees behind it" and
of the "old grey chapel behind the trees." There were also a number of
parti-coloured caps under suspended oars, and more