“I shall miss you too … Oh, that word — ‘Die Krähe’ — I can remember now — it means a bird that Poe wrote a poem about.”

“The raven?”

They looked up and saw Jessica standing outside the door, opening it slowly.

Fred Garton’s song drew an encore, and it was during this that Jessica returned to the drawing-room with David. It was noticed that he looked pale and weary, from which observers were ready to deduce an arduous errand.

But Jessica gave him no peace. It was not that she was deliberately uncivil, or that any actual thing she said could have been objected to, but rather that she put him in positions where he was constantly at a disadvantage. “David, Mr. Campbell can’t see his music — switch on the light over the piano, will you, please.” As most of the lights had been put out for the music, David had a choice of a dozen switches; and it was a little comic when he kept pressing the wrong ones. “I thought you knew,” said Jessica coolly, when he had at last succeeded. And then later: “David will turn over the pages for you, Mrs. Shapkey.” There was no reason at all why David should; he wasn’t good at reading piano music, and at nearly every turn he was so late that the pianist had to give him an agitated signal. Afterwards he apologized, but Jessica cut in with: “Don’t believe him, Mrs. Shapkey — it isn’t that he can’t read, it’s just that he doesn’t pay attention.” She laughed as she spoke, making it sound harmless, but the laugh itself was unyielding.

Finally she bothered him at the doorway with the hats. That was Susan’s job, not David’s, but of course he had to respond when she said: “David, have you seen Mr. Driveway’s hat? Do look for it.” He couldn’t refuse to join the search: on the other hand, what use was it to pick up hats at random when Mr. Driveway was so much more likely to discover his own?

Just little things like that.

And presently the guests departed; all grew quiet in the doctor’s house. At midnight he bicycled to the cottage where the boy lay dying of pneumonia but still alive. David stayed till four; then, with eyes hardly open, bicycled back through the dawn-lit streets. He did not go to bed, but slumped into the surgery chair and wakened at half-past seven, made himself a cup of tea, and cycled to the local infirmary. It was a small institution on the edge of the town, fairly well equipped, and efficiently managed. David as a rule looked forward to his visits there, preferring the orderliness of the wards to the cramped sickrooms of private houses; but that morning as he half dozed along the roads he could only think of the extraordinary fret and muddle that had encompassed him — he did not see what he could do about it, it all seemed so preposterous. He left the bicycle in the shed and walked in through the main doors of the hospital so slowly and vagrantly that a couple of nurses, watching from a window, commented upon his air of preoccupation. In the anteroom where he put on his surgeon’s uniform he was still oppressed with the revelation of a wantonly misbehaving world. Trevor, his young assistant, and Jones, the anaesthetist, had already arrived.