As to his old friend's enquiries about his own work and plans, he answered them quite readily, but shortly, without any expansion; with the manner, indeed, of one for whom talk about himself had no sort of attraction.

And as they passed along the front of the barracks, where a few men were drilling, Chicksands, struck by his companion's silence, turned a sudden look upon him.

Mannering's eyes were absently and yet intently fixed on the small squads of drilling men.

And it was sharply borne in on Chicksands that he was walking beside the mere image or phantom of a man, a man whose mind was far away--'voyaging through strange seas of thought alone.' Mannering's eyes were wide open; but they made the weird impression on the spectator of a double seeing--of some object of vision beyond and behind the actual scene of the barracks and the recruits, and that an object producing terror or pain.
Chicksands made a remark and it was not answered.
It was not the first time that Arthur had observed this trance-like state in the man who was to be his brother-in-law, and had been his 'chum' from childhood.

Others had noticed it, and he had reason to think that Beryl was often distressed by it.