me, and then he had been beaten and injured
again in some struggle between German and Croatian prisoners, and he had
sickened and died. Before he died he had written to his parents, and
once again he had asked that the fiddle he had left in Mr. Britling's
care should if possible be returned to them. It was manifest that both
for him and them now it had become a symbol with many associations.

The substance of this letter invaded the orange circle of the lamp; it
would have to be answered, and the potentialities of the answer were
running through Mr. Britling's brain to the exclusion of any impersonal
composition. He thought of the old parents away there in Pomerania--he
believed but he was not quite sure, that Heinrich had been an only
son--and of the pleasant spectacled figure that had now become a broken
and decaying thing in a prisoner's shallow grave....

Another son had gone--all the world was losing its sons....

He found himself thinking of young Heinrich in the very manner, if with
a lesser intensity, in which he thought about his own son, as of hopes
senselessly destroyed. His mind took no note of the fact that Heinrich
was an enemy, that by the reckoning of a "war of attrition" his death
was balance and compensation for the death of Hugh. He went straight to
the root fact that they had been gallant and kindly beings, and that the
same thing had killed them both....

By no conceivable mental gymnastics could he think of the two as
antagonists. Between them there was no imaginable issue. They had both
very much the same scientific disposition; with perhaps more dash and
inspiration in the quality of Hugh; more docility and method in the case
of Karl. Until war had smashed them one against the other....

He recalled his first sight of Heinrich at the junction, and how he had
laughed at the sight of his excessive Teutonism. The close-cropped
shining fair head surmounted by a yellowish-white corps cap had appeared
dodging about among the people upon the platform, and manifestly asking
questions. The face had been very pink with the effort of an
unaccustomed tongue. The young man had been clad in a suit of white
flannel refined by a purple line; his boots were of that greenish yellow
leather that only a German student could esteem "chic"; his rucksack
was upon his back, and the precious fiddle in its case was carried very
carefully in one hand; this same dead fiddle. The other hand held a
stick with a carved kno