e he had been fighting and to which
he still refused to accede. The knowledge that physical decay had to
be, that for him it had begun. He was still a young man as men count
youth nowadays, but he knew the difference between that and the tingle
of the rising sap of real youth. It was not Killigrew's death he mourned
so much as the death of that self who had been Killigrew's friend.

Long now he had been accustomed to the greater sense of proportion in
things mental and emotional which amounts to a greyer level of feeling;
he had lived on those not unsweet flats for years. But only lately had
the physical messages been flashing along to him down his nerves and
muscles, and he resented them far more bitterly than anything mental or
spiritual. His eyes--it might be they merely needed spectacles for close
work; but he resented that almost as fiercely as the fear about them
which sometimes assailed him when the pain was bad and his lids pricked
and were sore--the waning capacity to stand long strain and fatigue, the
waning power of physical reaction altogether.... Lately his cold bath
had meant a half-hour's shivering for him instead of the instantaneous
glow which showed perfect bodily response. He was a strong, healthy man
who had led a healthy life, but all the same he was not the man he had
been, and this night he acknowledged it. To this he had come, to this
everyone must come; as a commonplace he supposed he had always known
that, if he had been asked about it--even as a boy he would have agreed
to that, but with the inward thought: "Not to me ... it can't...." To
Nicky too it would come, though Nicky would have laughed the idea to
scorn as so far off as not to be worth troubling about. Yet how quickly
it came ... how terribly quickly! Life seemed to Ishmael to be a shining
ribbon that was always being pulled through the fingers, inexorably
fast, cling as they might.

Ishmael lifted his eyes and stared out over the darkening moor, and his
attention was caught by a flicker upon the western horizon. The last
line of light from the sun's setting still lingered there, so that at
first it was not easy to disengage from it that flicker of brighter
light which seemed vague as a candle flame in daytime. A few minutes
made certainty, however, and Ishmael stared at the gathering flicker and
wondered whether it were a serious fire or mere swaling. It gathered in
a rose of flame that gradually lit the horizon and burnt so steadily