ude. The love of David and Jonathan had not
been deeper than the affection he and his friend had had for one
another. The small estancia house became intolerable, with its sense
of void and the feeling that at any moment Toffy might appear, always
with some new project in hand, always gravely hopeful about everything
he undertook, always doing his best to risk his life in absurd ventures
such as no one else would have attempted. It was only the other day
that Peter had seen him trying to break a horse which even a gaucho
felt shy of riding; and he loved to be in the thick of the melee
attempting the difficult task of swinging a lasso above his head, with
that air of imperturbable gravity always about him. Or Peter pictured
him in the long chair, where during a feverish attack he had lain so
often, ruffling up his hair and puzzling his head over problems of
Hebrew theology. Every corner seemed to be full of him, and yet no one
had ever appeared to have a less assertive personality than he, nor a
lighter hold on his possessions. He thought of how he himself had
always gone to Toffy's dressing-table to borrow anything he might
require--the boy who was so much accustomed to have his things
appropriated by other people! And then again he saw him in the big,
ugly drawing-room at Hulworth, nursing one of his appalling colds, or
looking with grave resentment at his priceless collection of vases in
the glass cases in the hall. He remembered him riding in the
steeplechase at Sedgwick, and quite suddenly he recollected how sick
and faint Kitty Sherard had become when he fell at the last jump. He
thought of a silver box Toffy had bought for her at Bahia, and he
wondered how it was that he had been so blind as not to see how much
these two had cared for each other. His feeling of loss amounted
almost to an agony, and once when he had ridden alone far on to the
camp he shouted his dead friend's name aloud many times, and felt
baffled and disappointed when there was no response.

Good God! was it only two nights ago that he was picking out hymn-tunes
with his finger on the piano! At dinner-time they had been teasing him
about the Prophet Elijah, Toffy having calculated the exact distance
that the old prophet must have run in front of Ahab's chariot. 'It was
a fearful long sprint for an old man,' Toffy had said in a certain
quaint way he had. And now Toffy lay in his long, narrow grave under
the mimosa tree, and the world