ampaign 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