be pushed aside like this, and to have to reconsider one’s theories.  I did not expect to have to pull up—­the path lay plain before me—­and now it seems to me as if there were a good many things I had lost sight of.  Well, one must take things as they come, and I don’t think that if I had it all to do again I should do otherwise.”  He changed the subject rather hurriedly, and began to talk about my work.  “You are quite a great man now,” he said with a smile; “I hear your books talked about wherever I go—­I used to wonder if you would have had the patience to do anything—­you were hampered by having no need to earn your living; but you have come out on the top.”  I told him something about my own late experiences and my difficulty in writing.  He listened with undisguised interest.  “What do you make of it?” he said.  “Well,” I said; “you will think I am talking transcendentally, but I have felt often of late as if there were two strains in our life, two kinds of experience; at one time we have to do our work with all our might, to get absorbed in it, to do what little we can to enrich the world; and then at another time it is all knocked out of our hands, and we have to sit and meditate—­to realise that we are here on sufferance, that what we can do matters very little to any one—­the same sort of feeling that I once had when old Hoskyns, in whose class I was, threw an essay, over which I had taken a lot of trouble, into his waste-paper basket before my eyes without even looking it over.  I see now that I had got all the good I could out of the essay by writing it, and that the credit of it mattered very little; but then I simply thought he was a very disagreeable and idle old fellow.”

“Yes,” he said, smiling, “there is something in that; but one wants the marks as well—­I have always liked to be marked for my work.  I am glad you told me that story, old man.”

We went on to talk of other things, and when I rose to go, he thanked me rather effusively for my kindness in coming to see him.  He told me that he was shortly going abroad, and that if I could find time to write he would be grateful for a letter; “and when I am on my legs again,” he said with a smile, “we will have another meeting.”

That was all that passed between us of actual speech.  Yet how much more seems to have been implied than was said.  I knew, as well as if he had told me in so many words, that he did not expect to see me again; that he was in the valley of the shadow, and wanted help and comfort.  Yet he could not have described to me what was in his mind, and he would have resented it, I think, if I had betrayed any consciousness of my knowledge; and yet he knew that I knew, I am sure of that.