as no doubting their love. They were
very young and might have to wait, but he could trust her to wait all her
life. He knew dimly that she had been fond of him as a little boy, and
had gone on being fond of him, simply and unconsciously, because it was
not possible for her to forget. She would love him in the same way.
That steadfastness was like a light shining through the mists of her
character--through her sudden fancies, her shadowy withdrawals.

And still he was afraid, and sometimes he suspected that she was afraid
too. It was as though inexorable forces were rising up in both of them,
essentially of them, and yet outside their control, two dark antagonisms
waiting sorrowfully to join issue.

4

It had happened suddenly--not without warning. One little event trod on
the heels of another, rubble skirling down the mountain-side, growing to
an avalanche.

Or, again, Cosgrave might have been the odd, unlikely keystone of their
daily life. He had not seemed to matter much, but now that he had been
torn out the bridge between them crumbled.

It had been a day full of bitterness--of set-backs, which to Robert
Stonehouse were like pointing fingers. They were the outward expressions
of his disorder. He did not believe in luck, but in a man's strength or
weakness, and he knew by the things that happened to him that he was
weakening. A private operation had gone badly. He had bungled with his
dressings, so that the surgeon had turned on him in a burst of irritation.

"Better go home and sleep it off, Stonehouse."

He had not gone. He would not admit that he was ill--dared not. All
illness now meant the end of everything. It would wipe out all that they
had endured if he were to break down now. It would kill Christine. She
must not even guess.

He hung about the hospital common-room. The summer heat surging up from
the burning pavements stagnated between the faded walls. He could not
touch the food that he had brought with him. He was faint and sick, and
the long table at which he sat, with its white blur of newspapers, rose
and fell as though it were floating on an oily sea. But he held out. At
five o'clock he was to meet Francey at the gates, and, as though she had
some magic gift of relief, he strained towards that time, his head
between his hands, his ears counting the seconds that dripped heavily,
drowsily from the moon-faced clock.

And then she did not come. Outwardly it was only one