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 his ordered life.
The hills had changed too. They had been the background to his
exploits. They had become brooding, mysterious partners whose purpose
with him he had not fathomed. The things that ran across his path, the
quaint furry hares and scurrying pheasants had ceased to be objects on
which he could vent his strength and cunning.
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