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He awoke with a feeling of delightful joyousness, a sense that something beautiful had happened. It was as if the summer were quite suddenly and unexpectedly come; as if the whole world were full of happiness and sunshine.

Then he remembered—remembered it all; and a strange passionate tenderness filled his heart. Yes! it was the summer—summer indeed—the sun shone all around him. At the same time he felt within him a deep and unaccountable shyness, which kept him from joining his friend, which kept him alone with his own thoughts until morning school was finished.

By then he had turned things over in his mind, by then he had come even to wonder a little at his first bewilderment. It all seemed now so natural, so only what he had awaited, had come here for. Already a thing without beginning, without end! It was simply there—there like the air he breathed—something that had wrapped itself about his life, his whole being. And it slid back and back, without a break, without a pause, back into the past. There had been no first meeting at all; he had no need even to ask a question; there was no ambiguity to be explained, still less an anomaly. He knew, he felt; and as day followed day, and week followed week, he knew and felt more and more. He listened to the undertone, listened to it growing deeper and more melodious, becoming at times almost articulate, pointing the way; only when he strained his ear for the word, the word at last, definite, decisive, it died back again into silence.

And yet he had had other moments—moments when he had seen, or had seemed to see, that Brocklehurst understood little enough of all that their friendship meant to him. How could he understand? Graham, at least, could never tell him. Ah, no one, no one but himself understood, no one but himself knew how the gentle tone of his friend’s voice had a power to draw the tears to his eyes, a power to sink into his inmost soul. Oh, he loved him so dearly! There was something in the very secrecy of his affection that permitted him to keep it passionately apart from everything else, from his life of everyday, from any vulgar or prosaic encroachment. He kept it in a place sacred, beautiful, quiet; a chapel within his own spirit, a chapel into whose soft light he passed from time to time to worship, to be alone there, alone there with his love, alone there before the altar he had decked with candles and flowers, with the white stainless flowers of his boyish admiration, his innocence and faith....

Nevertheless, little by little, it was forced upon him—incredulous at first, reluctant to believe—that Brocklehurst’s reputation was not a good one. Nothing very precise as yet; only a few vague rumours; but he knew, could easily see, that his friend was not liked. At first he had found this hard to credit, inconceivable almost; but when one boy after another practically advised him to drop his chum he could no longer close his eyes to the fact. Naturally he felt tremendously angry. It seemed so mean, so cowardly, so unfair; for no one, though all were willing enough to hint, to suggest, appeared able to tell him anything definite. He knew, of course, that Brocklehurst had been absent from the school for a while—had been removed, more than one boy quite plainly told him—but even were this the case (and Brocklehurst himself had never alluded to it), the fact of his having been brought back again, in Graham’s opinion, openly, triumphantly, established his innocence. And innocence of what? When all was said and done, one could be sent away for merely asserting what one believed to be one’s rights—for impatience of routine, a hundred things that did not in the least imply any serious fault. It must be confessed that in his heart of hearts he now and then wondered if assertion of his rights, any more than impatience of routine, could very greatly imperil a boy’s popularity; but it was not until some time had elapsed that it actually occurred to him that he ought, after all, to speak to Brocklehurst himself of the matter, not telling him of course how far public opinion was against him, but putting him a little on his guard, giving him a little advice.

It was on a Sunday afternoon when they were out walking together—one of the latter days of spring—that he finally made up his mind to adopt this line of conduct; and he approached the subject at once, though at first a little hesitatingly, and in a rather roundabout fashion.

‘What are you going to be, Harold, when you grow up,’ he asked—‘when you leave school and college, I mean?’

Brocklehurst looked somewhat surprised. ‘Be!’ he echoed. ‘Oh, I can’t tell you that. I haven’t even thought about it yet.... Besides I don’t want to be anything in particular. I shall be myself, I suppose—just what I have always been.’

‘But I mean what shall you do?’ Graham persisted. ‘You’ll do something, of course. What do you think about when you are all alone?’

Brocklehurst smiled. ‘Very often of you,’ he said lightly. ‘Oh, I dare say I shall manage to drift along somehow or other. That is what I do now, you know.’

‘Drift?’

‘Yes. Don’t you think it rather charming?’ He spoke in the half-lazy, half-ironic fashion Graham had now grown accustomed to, but which he had noticed to have a curiously irritating effect upon other people. It was indeed just one of the innocent causes of Brocklehurst’s unpopularity that he had thought of alluding to, especially since it, more than anything else, tended to make his masters dislike him.

‘I haven’t any very strong hold upon things,’ Brocklehurst amplified. ‘Everything seems nice enough until I actually do it; but immediately afterwards it begins to bore me a little. As soon as you’ve tried a thing, you know, it’s apt to become the least bit tiresome. That is why I shouldn’t care to tie myself down to anything in particular.’

‘But you must, for all that, follow some definite way of life,’ Graham answered, dissatisfied.

‘My dear fellow, I only want to follow you.’

‘Me?’

‘Yes, you. I’m not joking at all. Since I’ve known you a great deal has changed. You’ve made me see things in a different way. It’s perhaps rather extraordinary, but it’s true. You’re so—what shall I call it?—good.’

‘But you don’t see them in my way,’ Graham objected.

‘I know—I know. I dare say not even in a way you’d care for. But still there is a great difference from the old way. Only I can’t exactly tell you what it is, nor how long it will last. Probably just as long as our friendship. That is why I want to keep close to you. I’ve been friends with other boys than you, you see,—even with some of those who try now to make you drop me. Look at those two rows of trees, Graham, running side by side for a little, and then suddenly branching off in opposite directions.’

‘Well?’

‘Well: they are like our destinies.’

Graham glanced at him. ‘Why do you say that?’ he asked a little strangely.

Brocklehurst smiled. ‘That is, if our friendship is ever to be broken,’ he explained.

‘A real friendship can never be broken,’ answered Graham slowly. ‘If you think that ours can, then it is not a very great one—even now.’

Brocklehurst nodded his head. ‘I wonder what you call a real friendship!’

‘Oh, if you have to ask——!’

‘It is only because I want you to tell me,’ he said softly.

Graham smiled. Then suddenly he saw the opening for which he had been waiting. ‘One of the signs of a real friendship is not to be afraid to speak openly to your friend of all that concerns both him and you.’

‘Ah, that means you have something rather unpleasant to tell me, doesn’t it?’ Brocklehurst inquired with a not unkindly irony. ‘Friends should have no secrets from each other, I expect?’

‘They ought to share everything,’ Graham replied simply; ‘and more than anything else they ought to share their thoughts.’

Brocklehurst paused. ‘Shall we sit down here,’ he asked, with a faint sigh, ‘before we begin?’

‘You make it very hard for me,’ Graham murmured, colouring a little.

‘Ah, you mustn’t mind that.’

They seated themselves on the trunk of a fallen tree, and a rather awkward silence followed.

Below them the ground sloped down, forming a little glen of trees and brambles, through which a narrow stream ran. The sunlight threading its way between the branches turned the raindrops upon the mossy grass to tiny globes of fire; and everywhere there was the fresh, life-giving smell of spring, of earth and moist vegetation. Brocklehurst sat with his chin between his hands; and his face, absolutely immobile, might have been carved in bronze. The corners of his mouth were drooped; and a deep line was drawn down his forehead between his eyes; his eyes, almost black in colour, gazed out straight before him. He appeared to be completely oblivious to Graham’s presence, to everything save his own thoughts, and the latter began to wonder a little as to what was passing in his mind.

And as he wondered a new world seemed to dawn upon his consciousness—a world where good and evil no longer stood so very far apart, were no longer so fixedly opposed to each other, so indissoluble as they had been, but were, rather, bound up together, inexplicably and hopelessly, almost defying disentanglement. A moment ago everything had been so clear, so plain before him; now, when he looked up, the sun was a little clouded over, and the whole colour and meaning of life stained with a darker hue. It seemed to him that he had been living in an atmosphere of dreamy idealism, the fruit of a plentiful lack of knowledge; and it did not occur to him that his ignorance had been beautiful, springing, as it did, not from stupidity, but from a peculiar type of mind, and an inexperience of life, of evil, even of sorrow. And a great compassion for the boy beside him welled up in his heart.

‘Do you think I tell you everything, then?’ Brocklehurst asked suddenly, a half-mocking smile hovering at the corners of his mouth, but in his voice just the faintest tremor.

Graham kept his eyes carefully averted from him. ‘I think you would like to,’ he answered slowly.

Brocklehurst shook his head. ‘No; I shouldn’t like to.’

‘Well then, you—you can’t trust me very much.’

‘Ah, but I do trust you.... Why do you want to be so serious?’ He smiled faintly. ‘I notice that you keep all your seriousness for me, who am nevertheless supposed to be your chum.’

Graham looked doubtfully at him. ‘Tell me that everything is all right,’ he said, ‘and I will believe you.’

‘Everything is all right.’

There was a silence.

‘Do you think you are keeping your promise?’ Brocklehurst asked, with a little laugh.

‘No; I suppose not.’

‘What do you want to hear? What do you want me to tell you? It is foolish, isn’t it, to bother about what is horrid, when there is so much that isn’t?’

‘In you, do you mean?’

‘In me, if you like.’

Graham turned away while he tried to puzzle it out. Then once more facing his companion, he seemed to himself to risk everything in a single question: ‘Why were you sent home?’

Brocklehurst just perceptibly coloured. ‘You haven’t, you know, considering that you are my friend, a very overwhelming confidence in me.’

Graham looked down. ‘Yes, I have,’ he answered suddenly, impulsively. ‘You must forgive me. I am a pretty low kind of chap to have ever doubted you; but I’ll never do so again.’

‘Not even if another fellow comes along and tells you things?’

‘Never, so long as I live.... What a beast you must think me.’

Brocklehurst shook his head. ‘I only think that some one has been doing his best to turn you against me. I dare say it is natural enough.... You see, I used to get out at night—not very often, but now and again—and they didn’t understand.’

‘Get out?’

‘Yes; through one of the windows.... And because I didn’t take anybody into my confidence, they were sure I was up to no good.... I had to go.... I can’t explain.’

‘You mean, it wasn’t to do any harm?’

‘It was only to be out there—to breathe the air, to be under the sky.’

‘But in the daytime—couldn’t you——’

‘No. I wanted to run in the moonlight; to run over the meadows; to bathe in the river; to be free.’

‘But why didn’t you tell them—when you knew what they thought?’

‘Oh, they are welcome to their thoughts. I’ve never in my life explained any of my actions, and I’m not going to begin now. Do you know——?’ he hesitated.

‘Know what?’

‘Only a strange fancy I used to have at such moments. It was rather queer’—he smiled shyly. ‘I used to feel just as if I had gone back to the life I had always been accustomed to—as if I had just awakened, if you can understand—while the other, my ordinary life, appeared to be a kind of dull dream, a kind of captivity which I should have to return to, but which, nevertheless, was not real.’

Graham watched him a moment in silence. ‘Suppose—suppose your fancy were the truth!’

‘The truth! Oh, nonsense! How could it be?’

‘Suppose you really did, long ago, live a life like that!’

‘Among woods and meadows and streams?’

‘Long ago, long ago——’

Brocklehurst shook his head.

‘The grass was soft under your feet,’ Graham whispered dreamily, ‘and there was the humming of bees——’

‘Where?—Where do you mean?’

‘And you played on the flute of Pan; and you bathed in the streams.... Do you remember?’

‘It was there that we first met?’

‘It was there that we ran in the sunlight over the green grass.’

‘It was there that we lay in the shadow of the trees.’

‘The deep sea: the dark sky: the sunshine: the waving branches: the garden:—it is just as if I could see the reflection of them all in your eyes.... Do you remember?’

Brocklehurst shook his head again. ‘Only when you tell me,’—he laughed somewhat ruefully. ‘After all, it is your garden, you know. I can’t get there by myself.’

‘If we really could get there!’

‘Oh, well, I’ll come with you any time if you’ll show me the way.’

‘Suppose you had a dream,’ Graham said slowly, thoughtfully, ‘and in your dream you saw there was only one way—should you have the courage to take it? I mean, if it was a way that seemed to lead into the darkness?—death!’

‘Death!’ Brocklehurst looked at him as he repeated the word. ‘No,’ he half whispered, ‘not that—I hate the idea of it. I hate everything connected with it.’

‘Still——’

‘Have you ever seen a dead person?’

‘No.’

‘I have, then—once.... I was made to look.... It was my grandfather.... But I’ll never look again at anything of that kind—never—never—never.... He was so changed—you can’t think.... His face and hands were like wax.... His hands.... Oh, I didn’t like them.... I saw them that night after I had gone to bed ... they were on the bedclothes ... they came closer and closer ... it was horrible.... No, no, there was no garden for him, believe me!—nothing—nothing any more.’

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