came in, it was
closed; but, by and by, Meredith became aware that the unbandaged eye
had opened and that it was suffused with a pathetic moisture; yet it
twinkled with a comprehending light, and John knew that it was his old
Tom Meredith who was sitting beside him, with the air of having sat
there very often before. But this bald, middle-aged young man, not
without elegance, yet a prosperous burgher for all that--was _this_ the
slim, rollicking broth of a boy whose thick auburn hair used to make one
streak of flame as he spun around the bases on a home run? Without doubt
it was the stupendous fact, wrought by the alchemy of seven years.

For, though seven years be a mere breath in the memories of the old, it
is a long transfiguration to him whose first youth is passing, and who
finds unsolicited additions accruing to some parts of his being and
strange deprivations in others, and upon whom the unhappy realization
begins to be borne in, that his is no particular case, and that he
of all the world is not to be spared, but, like his forbears, must
inevitably wriggle in the disguising crucible of time. 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 uns