His patients
believed in him; his colleagues respected him. Their knowledge of him
went no further than the operating theatre where they knew him best. He
had reckoned loneliness as an asset. But to feel it, as he felt it now
beneath this stilted exchange, was to become aware of a dull, stupid
pain. He found himself staring over the heads of the people, and wishing
that Cosgrave had never come back. And Cosgrave said gently, as though
he had read his thought and had made up his mind to have done with
insincerities:
"You're not to bother about me, Robert. It's been jolly, seeing you
again and all that, but we'd better let it end here. It always puzzled
me--your caring, you know, about a hapless fellow like myself. It's
against your real principles. I'm a dead weight. I couldn't give anyone
a solitary water-tight reason for my being alive. I think you did it
because you'd got your teeth into me by accident and couldn't let go. I
don't want you to get your teeth into me again."
"I don't believe," Stonehouse said, with an impatient laugh, "that I ever
let go at all."
His attention fixed itself on the illuminated sign that hung from the
portico of the Olympic Theatre opposite, and mechanically he began to
spell out the flaming letters:
"Gyp Labelle--Gyp Labelle!" At first the name scarcely reached his
consciousness, but in some strange way it focused his disquiet. It was
as though for a long time past he too had been indefinitely ill, and now
at an exasperating touch the poisoned blood rushed to a head of pain.
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