His message to Mrs.Newsome, in answer to her own, had consisted of the words: "Judge best to take another month, but with full appreciation of all re-enforcements." He had added that he was writing, but he was of course always writing; it was a practice that continued, oddly enough, to relieve him, to make him come nearer than anything else to the consciousness of doing something: so that he often wondered if he hadn't really, under his recent stress, acquired some hollow trick, one of the specious arts of make-believe.

Wouldn't the pages he still so freely dispatched by the American post have been worthy of a showy journalist, some master of the great new science of beating the sense out of words?
Wasn't he writing against time, and mainly to show he was kind ?--since it had become quite his habit not to like to read himself over.

On those lines he could still be liberal, yet it was at best a sort of whistling in the dark.

It was unmistakeable moreover that the sense of being in the dark now pressed on him more sharply--creating thereby the need for a louder and livelier whistle.

He whistled long and hard after sending his message; he whistled again and again in celebration of Chad's news; there was an interval of a fortnight in which this exercise helped him.
He had no great notion of what, on the spot, Sarah Pocock would have to say, though he had indeed confused premonitions; but it shouldn't be in her power to say--it shouldn't be in any one's anywhere to say--that he was neglecting her mother.