se pauses of conversation which
were habitual to us--John used to say, that the true test of friendship
was to be able to sit or walk together for a whole hour in perfect
silence, without wearying of one another's company--we again began
talking about Enderley.

I soon found, that in this plan, my part was simply acquiescence; my
father and John had already arranged it all. I was to be in charge of
the latter; nothing could induce Abel Fletcher to leave, even for a
day, his house, his garden, and his tan-yard. We two young men were to
set up for a month or two our bachelor establishment at Mrs. Tod's:
John riding thrice a-week over to Norton Bury to bring news of me, and
to fulfil his duties at the tan-yard. One could see plain enough--and
very grateful to me was the sight--that whether or no Abel Fletcher
acknowledged it, his right hand in all his business affairs was the lad
John Halifax.

On a lovely August day we started for Enderley. It was about eight
miles off, on a hilly, cross-country road. We lumbered slowly along in
our post-chaise; I leaning back, enjoying the fresh air, the changing
views, and chiefly to see how intensely John enjoyed them too.

He looked extremely well to-day--handsome, I was about to write; but
John was never, even in his youth, "handsome." Nay, I have heard
people call him "plain"; but that was not true. His face had that
charm, perhaps the greatest, certainly the most lasting, either in
women or men--of infinite variety. You were always finding out
something--an expression strange as tender, or the track of a swift,
brilliant thought, or an indication of feeling different from, perhaps
deeper than, anything which appeared before. When you believed you had
learnt it line by line it would startle you by a phase quite new, and
beautiful as new. For it was not one of your impassive faces, whose
owners count it pride to harden into a mass of stone those lineaments
which nature made as the flesh and blood representation of the man's
soul. True, it had its reticences, its sacred disguises, its noble
powers of silence and self-control. It was a fair-written, open book;
only, to read it clearly, you must come from its own country, and
understand the same language.

For the rest, John was decidedly like the "David" whose name I still
gave him now and then--"a goodly person;" tall, well-built, and strong.
"The glory of a young man is his strength;" and so I used often to
think, wh