capering at her heels). He
watched her, leaning forward, waiting for some sign, the faltering
gesture, a twitching grimace of realization. Or was it possible that
she was too empty-hearted to feel even her own tragedy, too shallow to
suffer, too stupid to foresee? At least he knew with certainty that in
that heated, exhausted atmosphere pain had set in.

He became aware that the sweat of it was on his own face--that he
himself was labouring under an intolerable physical burden. He knew
too much. (If God had His amusing moments he had also to suffer,
unless, as Mr. Ricardo had judged, he was a devil.) She was facing
what every man and woman in that theatre would have to face sooner or
later. How? She at any rate danced as though there were nothing in
the world but life. With each act her gestures, her very dress became
the clearer expression of an insatiable, uncurbed lust of living. At
the end, the orchestra, as though it could not help itself, broke into
the old doggerel tune that had helped to make her famous:

"I'm Gyp Labelle."

She waltzed and somersaulted round the stage, and as the curtain fell
she stood before the footlights, panting, her thin arms raised
triumphantly. He could see the tortured pulse leaping in her throat.
He thought he read her lips as they moved in a voiceless exclamation:

"_Quand meme--quand meme_."

The audience melted away indifferently. They, at any rate, did not
know what they had seen.

And the next day he had another little note from her, written in a
great sprawling hand. She had made all her arrangements, and she
thought she had better reserve rooms in his hospital in about six
weeks' time for about a month. After that, no doubt, she would require
less accommodation.

A silly, fatuous effort, in execrable taste.

V

1

Robert Stonehouse took a second leave that he could not afford and went
back to the grey cottage on the moors, and tramped the hills in haunted
solitude. The spring ran beside him, a crude, bitter, young spring,
gazing into the future with an earnest, passionate face, full of
arrogance and hope, and self-distrust. His own frustrated youth rose
in him like a painful sap. He was much younger than the Robert
Stonehouse who, proud in his mature strength, had dragged an exhausted,
secretively smiling Cosgrave on his relentless pursuit--young and
insecure, with odd nameless rushes of emotion and desire and grief that
had had no part in