like strangers when you are thrown together again. If you had
come up here it would have been all right, and we should have
gone all through life as we were when I left school, and as I
know we should be again in no time if you had come here. But now,
who can tell?

"What makes me think so much of this is a visit of a few days
that East paid me just before his regiment went to India. I feel
that if he hadn't done it, and we had not met till he came
back--years hence perhaps--we should never have been to one
another what we shall be now. The break would have been too
great. Now it's all right. You would have liked to see the old
fellow grown into a man, but not a bit altered--just the quiet,
old way, pooh-poohing you, and pretending to care for nothing,
but ready to cut the nose off his face, or go through fire and
water for you at a pinch, if you'll only let him go his own way
about it, and have his grumble, and say that he does it all from
the worst possible motives.

"But we must try not to lose hold of one another, Geordie. It
would be a bitter day to me if I thought anything of the kind
could ever happen again. We must write more to one another. I've
been awfully lazy, I know, about it for this last year and more;
but then I always thought you would be coming up here, and so
that it didn't matter much. But now I will turn over a new leaf,
and write to you about my secret thoughts, my works and ways; and
you must do it too. If we can only tide over the next year or two
we shall get into plain sailing, and I suppose it will all right
then. At least, I can't believe that one is likely to have many
such up-and-down years in one's life as the last two. If one is,
goodness knows where I shall end. You know the outline of what
has happened to me from my letters, and the talks we have had in
my flying visits to the old school, but you haven't a notion of
the troubles of mind I've been in, and the changes I've gone
through. I can hardly believe it myself when I look back. However
I'm quite sure I have _got on_; that's my great comfort. It is a
strange blind sort of world, that's a fact, with lots of blind
alleys, down which you go blundering in the fog after some seedy
gaslight, which you take for the sun till you run against the
wall at the end, and find out that the light is a gaslight, and
that there's no thoroughfare. But for all that one does get on.
You get to know the sun's light better and better, and to keep
ou