dder, and a moment later seemed to forget him
altogether. She pressed her cigarette out on her plate and went over
to the piano, touching Cosgrave lightly on the shoulder as she passed
him.

"Come, my latest best-beloved, we 'ave to amuse ze company. We sing
our leetle song together."

But first she made a deep low bow to the shadowy theatre. She kissed
her fingers to the empty boxes that stared down at her with hollow,
mournful eyes. (Were there ghosts there too, Stonehouse wondered
bitterly? The unlucky Frederick, perhaps, with the fatal hole gaping
above the temple, applauding, leaning towards her!)

She sang worse than usual. She was hoarse, and what voice she had gave
way altogether. It did not seem to matter either to her or to anyone
else. What she could not sing she danced. There was a chorus and they
joined in filling the gloom behind them with sullen, ironic echoes.
She reduced them all, Stonehouse thought, to the cabaret from which she
sprang.

And it was comic to see Cosgrave with his head thrown back, playing the
common, noisy stuff as though inspired.

When it was over he swung round, gaping at them with drunken,
confidential earnestness.

"You know, when I was a kid I used to see myself--on a stage like
this--playing the Moonlight Sonata."

She rumpled up his thick hair so that it stood on end like Loga's names.

"You play my song ver' nice. And that is much better than playing ze
Moonlight Sonata all wrong, my leetle friend."

3

It was a sort of invisible catastrophe.

No one else knew of it. In the day-time he himself did not believe in
it--did not, at first, think of it at all. It had all the astonishing
unreality of past pain. He went his way as usual, was arbitrary and
cocksure with his patients, and looked forward to the evening when he
could put them out of his mind altogether and give himself to his vital
work. For the hospital had become a fact. It stood equipped and
occupied, an unrecognized but actual witness to his tenacity. Other
men would get the credit. The Committee who had appointed him
consulting surgeon, not without references to his unusual youth and
their own daring break with tradition--had no suspicion that even the
fund which, in a fit of inexplicable far-seeingness they had allotted
to research, had been created under his ceaseless pressure. And not
even in his thoughts was he satirical at their expense. They had
provided the money and done w