The substance of this letter invaded the orange circle of the lamp; it would have to be answered, and the potentialities of the answer were running through Mr. Britling’s brain to the exclusion of any impersonal composition.  He thought of the old parents away there in Pomerania—­he believed but he was not quite sure, that Heinrich had been an only son—­and of the pleasant spectacled figure that had now become a broken and decaying thing in a prisoner’s shallow grave....

Another son had gone—­all the world was losing its sons....

He found himself thinking of young Heinrich in the very manner, if with a lesser intensity, in which he thought about his own son, as of hopes senselessly destroyed.  His mind took no note of the fact that Heinrich was an enemy, that by the reckoning of a “war of attrition” his death was balance and compensation for the death of Hugh.  He went straight to the root fact that they had been gallant and kindly beings, and that the same thing had killed them both....

By no conceivable mental gymnastics could he think of the two as antagonists.  Between them there was no imaginable issue.  They had both very much the same scientific disposition; with perhaps more dash and inspiration in the quality of Hugh; more docility and method in the case of Karl.  Until war had smashed them one against the other....

He recalled his first sight of Heinrich at the junction, and how he had laughed at the sight of his excessive Teutonism.  The close-cropped shining fair head surmounted by a yellowish-white corps cap had appeared dodging about among the people upon the platform, and manifestly asking questions.  The face had been very pink with the effort of an unaccustomed tongue.  The young man had been clad in a suit of white flannel refined by a purple line; his boots were of that greenish yellow leather that only a German student could esteem “chic”; his rucksack was upon his back, and the precious fiddle in its case was carried very carefully in one hand; this same dead fiddle.  The other hand held a stick with a carved knob and a pointed end.  He had been too German for belief.  “Herr Heinrich!” Mr. Britling had said, and straightway the heels had clashed together for a bow, a bow from the waist, a bow that a heedless old lady much burthened with garden produce had greatly disarranged.  From first to last amidst our off-hand English ways Herr Heinrich had kept his bow—­and always it had been getting disarranged.

That had been his constant effect; a little stiff, a little absurd, and always clean and pink and methodical.  The boys had liked him without reserve, Mrs. Britling had liked him; everybody had found him a likeable creature.  He never complained of anything except picnics.  But he did object to picnics; to the sudden departure of the family to wild surroundings for the consumption of cold, knifeless and forkless meals in the serious middle hours of the day.  He protested to Mr. Britling, respectfully but very firmly.  It was, he held, implicit in their understanding that he should have a cooked meal in the middle of the day.  Otherwise his Magen was perplexed and disordered.  In the evening he could not eat with any gravity or profit....