And, though men accept it with apparently
patient humor, the first realization that people do grow old, and that
they do it before they have had time to be young, is apt to come like a
shock.
Perhaps not even in the interminable months of Carlow had Harkless
realized the length of seven years so keenly as he did when he beheld his
old friend at his bedside. How men may be warped apart in seven years,
especially in the seven years between twenty-three and thirty! At the
latter age you may return to the inseparable of seven years before and
speak not the same language; you find no heartiness to carry on with each
other after half an hour. Not so these classmates, who had known each
other to the bone.
Ah, yes, it was Tom Meredith, the same lad, in spite of his masquerade of
flesh; and Helen was right: Tom had not forgotten.
"It's the old horse-thief!" John murmured, tremulously.
"You go plumb to thunder," answered Meredith between gulps.
When he was well enough, they had long talks; and at other times Harkless
lay by the window, and breathed deep of the fresh air, while Meredith
attended to his correspondence for him, and read the papers to him. But
there was one phenomenon of literature the convalescent insisted upon
observing for himself, and which he went over again and again, to the
detriment of his single unswathed eye, and this was the Carlow "Herald.
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