o violently as
had been the case with the other two old playmates. Killigrew had lived
his life very thoroughly, though he had always loved not well but too
wisely. Sitting there on the lonely moor amid the ruined china-clay
works, with only the sounds of bird and beast breaking the still air,
Ishmael seemed to himself as though suspended in a state that was
neither space nor time, when independent of either he could roam the
past as the present, and even the future as well. It was as though time
were cut out of one long endless piece as he had often imagined it as a
little boy, when he had been puzzled that it was not as easy to see
forwards as backwards, and been pricked by the feeling that it was
merely a forgotten faculty which at any moment hard straining, if only
it lit on the right way, could regain. For the first time for many years
he had a glimpse of the pattern of life instead of only the intricacies,
seemingly without form, of each phase. Killigrew and, in a much less
degree--but, as he now saw, hardly less keenly--Hilaria, had both so
affected the web of his life, not in action, but in thought, that
without them he would either have learnt different lessons or the same
lessons quite differently. Even Judith, Carminow, and all the rest of
the people who had impinged in greater or less degree, went to make the
pattern, though not always, as with Killigrew, Hilaria, and
Polkinghorne, could he see any one definite thing that they had been the
means of making clear to his groping vision. For we cannot know people
with even the lightest degree of intimacy without both taking from them
and giving to them. Externally it may be only two or three people in
life who have had the influencing of it, but each casual encounter has
helped to prepare us for those people.

What Ishmael felt in regard to Killigrew at the present moment--and
rightly felt, for, as he found out later, on the day the letter arrived
at Cloom Killigrew had died--left a blank in his life, but more it
brought home to him that, the meridian once passed, blanks were things
that would increase. Children grew up, but they grew away; grandchildren
would be a stay, but one must be content to be a background for them.
This falling away, step by step, through life was, he saw, part of its
ordered procession. And he saw too, with a deadly sureness there was no
evading, that this thing he knew of Killigrew stood for another
knowledge to him as well, a knowledg