seldom care ... and no one, not
even she, could bring comfort to the one who was left. So she just held
him....

10

Mrs. Graham had left them alone. Her fear had been for Ninian, and when
she heard Gilbert's name, her relief was such that she had hurried from
the room lest Henry, stricken by the death of his friend, should see her
face.

"I know now," he said when he was calmer, "what it was on the White
Cliff. He wanted to tell me, Mary. He wanted to tell me ... and I
wouldn't look round. Oh, my God, I wouldn't look round!"

THE NINTH CHAPTER

1

It was unbelievable that Gilbert was dead. In his mind, Henry could see
him, careless, extravagant, always good-tempered and sometimes strangely
wise and understanding ... and he could not believe that he would never
see him again, that all that youth and generosity and promise should be
turned so untimely to corruption. Gilbert's friends would not even know
where his grave was ... they would not have the poor consolation of
finding a place that was his, marked out from all the other places....
He had been seen, running forward ... and then he was seen no more....

"Perhaps," Henry said to comfort himself, "he's been taken prisoner. We
shall hear later on that he's been taken prisoner!..."

He snatched at any hope. Men had been posted among the dead ... and
then, after a time of mourning, had come the news that they still lived.
Perhaps Gilbert was lying somewhere ... wounded ... and after a while,
news of him would come. Other men might die, but it was incredible that
Gilbert should be killed....

He became obsessed with the belief that Gilbert still lived. He went
about expecting to see him suddenly turning a corner and shouting,
"Hilloa, Quinny!" At any moment, a door might open, and Gilbert would
walk in and say, "Well, coves!" There was a printed copy of "The Magic
Casement" in the house, and Henry would pick it up, and turn over the
pages.... "But he can't be dead," he would say to himself, as he
fingered the book. "It's absurd!..." Even when hope died, there came
times when the belief in Gilbert's survival thrust itself into his
mind. When the _Lusitania_ was torpedoed, he said to himself, "Why, we
saw her just after the war began, Gilbert and I, and we cheered!..."

The brutality of the war smote him hard. In less than a year from the
day when they had stood on the rocks at Tre'Arrdur Bay, lustily cheering
as the great Atlantic liner sailed up t