But to go--and leave her; to go--just at the beginning--before one knows anything--before one has finished anything--' And again his eyes wandered from her to the suffusion of light and colour on the lake.

'How could anyone ever want anything better than this earth--this life--at its best--if only one were allowed a full and normal share of it!' And he thought again, almost with a leap of exasperation, of those dead and mangled men--out there--in France.

Who was responsible--God ?--or man?
But man's will is--must be--something dependent--something included in God's will.

If God really existed, and if He willed war, and sudden death--then there must be another life.

Or else the power that devised the world was not a good, but an evil--at best, a blind one.
But while his young brain was racing through the old puzzles in the old ways, Nelly was thinking of something quite different.