rs, bright with sunshine, that were now
charged with acquired significances; there were two showing the children
and Teddy and Hugh and Cissie and Letty doing the goose step, and there
was one of Mr. Van der Pant, smiling at the front door, in Heinrich's
abandoned slippers. There were endless pictures of Teddy also. It is the
happy instinct of the Kodak to refuse those days that are overcast, and
the photographic record of a life is a chain of all its kindlier
aspects. In the drawer above these snapshots there were Hugh's letters
and a miscellany of trivial documents touching on his life.

Mr. Britling discontinued writing and turned these papers over and
mused. Heinrich's letters and postcards had got in among them, and so
had a letter of Teddy's....

The letters reinforced the photographs in their reminder how kind and
pleasant a race mankind can be. Until the wild asses of nationalism came
kicking and slaying amidst them, until suspicion and jostling greed and
malignity poison their minds, until the fools with the high explosives
blow that elemental goodness into shrieks of hate and splashes of blood.
How kindly men are--up to the very instant of their cruelties! His mind
teemed suddenly with little anecdotes and histories of the goodwill of
men breaking through the ill-will of war, of the mutual help of sorely
wounded Germans and English lying together in the mud and darkness
between the trenches, of the fellowship of captors and prisoners, of
the Saxons at Christmas fraternising with the English.... Of that he had
seen photographs in one of the daily papers....

His mind came back presently from these wanderings to the task before
him.

He tried to picture these Heinrich parents. He supposed they were
kindly, civilised people. It was manifest the youngster had come to him
from a well-ordered and gentle-spirited home. But he imagined them--he
could not tell why--as people much older than himself. Perhaps young
Heinrich had on some occasion said they were old people--he could not
remember. And he had a curious impulse too to write to them in phrases
of consolation; as if their loss was more pitiable than his own. He
doubted whether they had the consolation of his sanguine temperament,
whether they could resort as readily as he could to his faith, whether
in Pomerania there was the same consoling possibility of an essay on the
Better Government of the World. He did not think this very clearly, but
that was what wa