ing he had treated David in an
exceptional manner. In unobserved ways he had done him little
kindnesses, and proffered many delicate advances of friendship, and not
many months passed before the two lonely, suspicious and ostracized men
united their fortunes in a sort of informal partnership and were living
in common apartments.

The most marked characteristic of this restricted friendship was a
disposition to respect the privacy of each other's lives and thoughts.
In all their intercourse through the year in which they had been thus
associated they had never obtruded their personal affairs upon each
other, nor pried into each other's secrets.

There was in Foster Mantel a sort of sardonic humor into which he was
always withdrawing himself. In one of their infrequent conversations the
two companions had grown unusually confidential and found themselves
drifting a little too near that most dangerous of all shoals in the
lives of such men--the past.

With a swift, instinctive movement both of them turned away. Each read
in the other's face consciousness of the impossibility of discussing
those experiences through which they had come to be what they were. Such
men guard the real history of their lives and the real emotions of their
hearts as jealously as the combinations of their cards. The old,
ironical smile lighted up Mantel's features, and he said:

"We seem to have a violent antipathy to thin ice, Davy, and skate away
from it as soon as it begins to crack a little beneath our feet."

"Yes," said his friend, shrugging his shoulders, "it is not pleasant to
fall through the crust of friendship. There is a sub-element in every
life a too sudden plunge into which might result in a fatal chill. We
had all better keep on the surface. I am frank enough to say that the
less any one knows about my past, the better I shall be satisfied."

"I wish that I could keep my own self from invading that realm as easily
as I can keep others! Why is it that no man has ever yet been able to
'let the dead past bury its dead'? It seems a reasonable demand."

"He is a poor sexton--this old man, the Past. I have watched him at his
work, and he is powerless to dig his own grave, however many others he
may have excavated!"

"The Present seems as helpless as the Past. I wonder if the future will
heap enough new events over old ones to hide them from view?"

"Let a shadow bury the sun! Let a wave bury the sea," answered David
bitterly.