The young man gave a laugh almost too light for a chamber of woe. ‘Never a penny. She roundly cursed me.’

‘Cursed you?’ Dencombe murmured.

‘For giving her up. I gave her up for you. I had to choose,’ his companion explained.

‘You chose to let a fortune go?’

‘I chose to accept, whatever they might be, the consequences of my infatuation,’ smiled Doctor Hugh. Then, as a larger pleasantry: ‘A fortune be hanged! It’s your own fault if I can’t get your things out of my head.’

The immediate tribute to his humour was a long, bewildered moan; after which, for many hours, many days, Dencombe lay motionless and absent. A response so absolute, such a glimpse of a definite result and such a sense of credit worked together in his mind and, producing a strange commotion, slowly altered and transfigured his despair. The sense of cold submersion left him—he seemed to float without an effort. The incident was extraordinary as evidence, and it shed an intenser light. At the last he signed to Doctor Hugh to listen, and, when he was down on his knees by the pillow, brought him very near.

‘You’ve made me think it all a delusion.’

‘Not your glory, my dear friend,’ stammered the young man.

‘Not my glory—what there is of it! It is glory—to have been tested, to have had our little quality and cast our little spell. The thing is to have made somebody care. You happen to be crazy, of course, but that doesn’t affect the law.’

‘You’re a great success!’ said Doctor Hugh, putting into his young voice the ring of a marriage-bell.

Dencombe lay taking this in; then he gathered strength to speak once more. ‘A second chance—that’s the delusion. There never was to be but one. We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.’

‘If you’ve doubted, if you’ve despaired, you’ve always “done” it,’ his visitor subtly argued.

‘We’ve done something or other,’ Dencombe conceded.

‘Something or other is everything. It’s the feasible. It’s you!’

‘Comforter!’ poor Dencombe ironically sighed.

‘But it’s true,’ insisted his friend.

‘It’s true. It’s frustration that doesn’t count.’

‘Frustration’s only life,’ said Doctor Hugh.

‘Yes, it’s what passes.’ Poor Dencombe was barely audible, but he had marked with the words the virtual end of his first and only chance.

The Abasement of the Northmores

I

When Lord Northmore died public reference to the event took for the most part rather a ponderous and embarrassed form. A great political figure had passed away. A great light of our time had been quenched