air of holding
some simple and sweet secret which they would not tell, and which Hugh
could not penetrate. It was sad, too, to think that the beautiful day
was done, become a memory only; and that he must plunge again for the
morrow and for many morrows into the tide of affairs and boisterous
life. He made one effort to put his thoughts into words. Putting his
arm for a moment in the arm of his companion, he said, "Let us remember
to-day!" His friend, who was walking sedately along with a stalk of
grass between his lips, looked at him in a peculiar manner, smiled and
nodded; this little compact, so quietly made, seemed for an instant to
have brought Hugh and his friend together into a charmed circle. Had
his friend forgotten what he remembered? The last time he had seen
him, he had found a prosperous business man, full of affairs; and he
had not reminded him of the day when they went together by the stream.

The whole picture came before Hugh as an almost impossible sweet and
rapturous memory, clutching with a poignant passion at his heart. What
was the secret of the fragrant days that had departed and could never
return? Was it well to recall them? And what too was the secret of
that strange and beautiful alchemy of the mind, that forgot all the
troubles and cares of the old life, and even touched the few harsh
incidents that it did retain with a wistful beauty, as though they had
had some desirable element in them? Would it not be better, more
tranquillising for the spirit, if the memory retained only the dark
shadows of the past? so that the mind could turn with zest and interest
to the joys of the moment? Instead of that, memory tempted the soul,
by a kind of magical seduction, to dwell only upon what was sweet and
beautiful in the past, thereby emphasising and heightening the sense of
dissatisfaction with the present. Was it true that the very days that
were then passing, those sober, uneventful days, would at some future
time be touched by the same reluctant, pathetic quality of
recollection? It was certainly so; the mind, dwelling on the past, had
that extraordinary power of rejecting all the dreary debris of life,
and leaving only the pure gold, a hundred times refined; and yet it
brought with it that mournful shadow of sadness, of the irrevocable,
the irreplaceable past. But it seemed, too, to hold a hope within it,
a hope that, if the pilgrimage of the soul were not to be ended by
death, then me