and
cracked at the back of the bookshelf. The reader will now be able to
understand how sorrowful were the reflections it aroused, and how it led
me to suspect the story of a joyless life; and I trust he will forgive
me for having taken him so far from David Holst's room--where I sat and
waited for my friend to come with the punch--into the land of my
youthful recollections. For three years we had been together almost
daily. After that David had to go out as tutor, and our ways parted, as
they so often do in this life.

And this evening we had met again.

There was a jingling in the passage, and immediately after David Holst
carefully opened the door for a servant-girl, who brought in a steaming
jug of hot water and other requisites for punch, which were most welcome
to a man who had been out several hours in the wind and rain, as I had
that very afternoon.

David found me installed on the sofa with his pipe in my mouth and his
slippers on my feet, just as he would have done in the old days, and
this I reckoned as one of my cunning artifices; for with these passes,
his pipe and slippers, I reinstated myself, without more ado, on the old
friendly footing. I felt like a general who is fortunate enough to open
the campaign by occupying a whole province.

In default of his accustomed place on the sofa, David drew a chair up
to the table and sat down opposite to me, with the punch tray between
us.

We were now once more on the banks of the same river of delight, in
which we had so often bathed and tumbled in our youth; but now we both
approached it more carefully.

In the course of conversation, he often leaned over towards me, as if
listening, and in this way his head came within the region of the lamp's
bright light. I then noticed that his hair was much thinner, and
sprinkled rather plentifully with grey, and that the perspiration stood
in beads on his no longer unwrinkled brow. His pallid, sharp-featured
face, and a strange brilliancy in his eyes, told me that either his
physical or his mental being hid an underground fire, perhaps no longer
quenchable. Thinking from his repeated fits of coughing, that his
bending over towards me arose quite as much from the fact that he was
tired and was trying to rest against the edge of the table, as from his
interest in the conversation, I determined to enter at once upon the
question of the state of his health, and thus put myself in possession
of yet another important outw