"I can't help it if it is, Gilly! I must lend a hand somehow or _I_ shall crack up. It's little enough one can do, besides being day-nurse to poor old Coplestone, and this afternoon he's asleep for once. What a great chap he is, Gilly, and will be ever after, if only we can pull the lad through and then get them both out of this! But it's two lives hanging on one thread, and that cursed old man of mine trying all he knows to cut it! I'll euchre him, you'll see. By hook or crook I'll balk him----"

But white clouds were tumbling behind the red houses opposite, and Delavoye dashed out again to catch his train, like the desperate leader of a forlorn hope, leaving his dark eyes burning before mine and his wild words ringing in my ears.

Quite apart from the point on which he was never sane, he seemed to have lost the otherwise level head on which I had learnt to rely at any crisis; but Coplestone still kept his, and him I admired more and more. He still took his exercise like a man, refrained from harrying nurse or doctor, showed an untroubled face by the sick-bed, but avoided the room more and more, and altogether during the terrible delirious stages.

"If I were to stay there long," he said to me once, "I should make a scene. I couldn't help it. There are more things than one to cloud your mind, and I've got to keep mine unclouded all the time."

He kept it very nearly serene; and his serenity was not the numbness of despair which sometimes wears the same appearance; for I do not think there was a moment at which Coplestone despaired. He had much too stout a heart. There was nothing forced or unnatural in his manner; his feelings were not deadened for an instant, yet not for an instant would he give them rein. Only, our sober vigils cut deeper lines than his excesses before Christmas, and every night left him a hard year older.We spent them all downstairs in his study. Neither of us was a chess-player, and I was all unversed in cards, but sometimes we played draughts or dominoes by the hour, as though one of us had been Ronnie himself. Often we talked of him, but never as though there were any question of his eventual recovery. Coplestone would only go so far as to bemoan the probability of an entirely lost hockey term, and his eye would steal round to the photograph of last year's hockey eleven at Ronnie's little school, in a place of honour on the mantelpiece, where indeed it concealed one of his own most heroic trophies.

Fitted and proportioned like half a hundred others on the Estate, that study of Coplestone's is 

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