For his part he was not without consolations, since, strangely enough, he never felt as if she were lost to him, or indeed far away; it was always as though she were in the next room, or at any rate in the next street. There are individuals of sensitive mind, and he was one of them, who know well enough when such a total loss has occurred. It has been well said that the dead are never really dead to us until they are forgotten, and the same applies to the living. While they remember us, they are never so very far away, and what is more we, or some of us, are quite aware if they have ceased to remember, for then the door is shut and the doorway built up and our hearts tell us that this has been done.
In Godfrey's case with Isobel, not only did the doorway remained unfilled--the door itself was always ajar. Although seas divided them and over these no whisper came, yet he felt her thought leaping to him across the world. Especially did this happen at night when he laid himself down to sleep, perhaps because then his mind was most receptive, and since their hours of going to rest must have been different, he being in India and she in England, she could scarcely have been reflecting on him as he fondly believed, at the moment when she, too, entered into the world called sleep.
Therefore, either it was all imagination or he caught her waking thoughts, or perhaps those that haunted her upon this border land were delayed until his subtler being could interpret them. Who knows? At least, unless something had happened to disturb him, those nights were rare when as he was shutting his eyes, Godfrey did not seem to be sensible of Isobel's presence. At any rate, he knew that she had not forgotten; he knew that somewhere in the vast world she was ever thinking of him with more intensity than she thought of any other man or thing. And during all those lonely years this knowledge or belief was his greatest comfort.
Not that Godfrey's life in India was in any way unhappy. On the contrary it was a full and active life. He worked hard at his profession and succeeded in it to a limited extent, and he had his friends, especially his great friend Arthur Thorburn, who always clung to him. He had his flirtations also; being a man of susceptibility who was popular with women, how could they be avoided? For above all things Godfrey was a man, not a hermit or a saint or an æsthete, but just a man with more gifts of a sort than have some others. He lived the life of the rest, he hunted, he shot tigers, doing those things that the Anglo-Indian officer does, but all the same he studied. Whether it were of his trade of soldiering, or of the natives, or of Eastern thought and law, he was always learning something, till at last he knew a great deal, often he wondered to what end.