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 the sea to the Mersey, Gilbert was dead and the proud ship was a wreck, sneakily destroyed....

Gilbert had left the beginning of a play behind him. He had regretted that he could not finish it before going out to the peninsula ... had believed that in it he would create something finer and deeper than he had yet done ... and now it would never reach completion. The mind that imagined it was no more than the rubbish of the fields when the harvest is gathered....

His own work became tasteless to him. He turned with disrelish from his manuscript. "What's the good of it," he said to himself, whenever he looked at it. He tried to put himself into communication with Gilbert's spirit, remembering that night below the White Cliff, when, he now believed, Gilbert had tried to tell him of his death. A month before, he would have ridiculed any one who suggested to him that he should attempt to speak to the dead. "Spookery!" he would have said. But now, in his eagerness to atone, as he said, for his failure to respond when Gilbert had tried to speak to him, he put faith in things that, before, would have seemed contemptible to him. But with all his will to believe, he could not call Gilbert to him. There was a blankness, a condemning silence....

"I failed my friend," he groaned to himself once, "When he felt for me most, I ... I failed him!"