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 knowledge 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