Finch did not return home for a week. He remained under Meg's protective care, feeling the not unpleasant languor that follows the overstrain of hysterical emotion. He spent the first days in bed, listening indolently to the various noises of the house, the cooing of Patience, the singing of Minny Ware, the activities of the old Scotch housekeeper. Over and over again, as he lay there, he reviewed the events of his life since the New Year. His playing with the orchestra, his shadowy acquaintance with the other members of it: Burns, from the abattoir, Meech, the tailor's assistant. Their faces came and went. He thought oftenest of his friend, George Fennel, with his square hands, so deft on the banjo strings, his thickset figure, and his eyes beaming beneath his rumpled hair. He had not seen George since his return from New York. George had spent his summer as swimming instructor at a boys' camp, and they had not written to each other. Friendship with George was such an easeful thing. When you were separated from him you did not write to him or perhaps often think of him, but once you were together again the gap of separation was bridged as though it had never been. Looking back on the cold nights when he and his friend had slipped from the house of George's aunt, and hastened to some dance hall to play with the orchestra, Finch thought that this had been the happiest time of his life. The adventurous freedom of it, the exciting risk, the playing of dance music for the rhythmically swaying bodies of bright-eyed boys and girls, the creeping home toward morning with money in their pockets! As he lay in bed he hummed their favourite dance tunes.
He reviewed his friendship with Arthur Leigh. How different from his friendship with George, which had
