I understand that this torpor is quite common with men and women suddenly bereaved.  I believe that a whole week passed before my brain recovered any really vital motion; and then such feeble thought as I could exert was wholly occupied with the desperate stupidity of the whole affair.  If God were indeed shaping the world to any end, if any design of His underlay the activities of men, what insensate waste to quench such a heart and brain as Harry’s!—­to nip, as it seemed out of mere blundering wantonness, a bud which had begun to open so generously:  to sacrifice that youth and strength, that comeliness, that enthusiasm, and all for nothing!  Had some campaign claimed him, had he been spent to gain a citadel or defend a flag, I had understood.  But that he should be killed on a friendly mission; attacked in ignorance by those East Coast savages while bearing gifts to their king; deserted by the porters whose comfort (on their own confession) he had studied throughout the march; left to die, to be tortured, mutilated—­and all for no possible good:  these things I could not understand.  At the end he might have escaped; but as he caught hold of his saddle by the band between the holsters, it parted:  it was not leather, but faced paper, the job of some cheating contractor.  I thought of this, too.  And Harry had been through Chitral!

But though a man may hate, he cannot easily despise God for long.  “He is great—­but wasteful,” said the American.  We are the dust on His great hands, and fly as He claps them carelessly in the pauses of His work.  Yet this theory would not do at all:  for the unlucky particles are not dust, not refuse, but exquisite and exquisitely fashioned, designed to live, and to every small function of life adapted with the minutest care.  There were nights indeed when, walking along the shore where we had walked together on the night before Harry left England and looking from the dark waters which divided me from his grave up to the nightly moon and to the stars around her, I could well believe God wasteful of little things.  Sirius flashing low, Orion’s belt with the great nebula swinging like a pendant of diamonds; the ruby stars, Betelgueux and Aldebaran—­my eyes went up beyond these to Perseus shepherding the Kids westward along the Milky way.  From the right Andromeda flashed signals to him:  and above sat Cassiopeia, her mother, resting her jewelled wrists on the arms of her throne.  Low in the east Jupiter trailed his satellites in the old moon’s path.  As they all moved, silent, looking down on me out of the hollow spaces of the night, I could believe no splendid waste too costly for their perfection:  and the Artificer who hung them there after millions of years of patient effort, if more intelligible than a God who produced them suddenly at will, certainly not less divine.  But walking the same shore by daylight I recognised that the shells, the mosses, the flowers I trampled on, were, each in its way, as perfect as those great stars:  that on these—­ and on Harry—­as surely as on the stars—­God had spent, if not infinite pains, then at least so superlative a wisdom that to conceive of them as wastage was to deny the mind which called them forth.