As best we could we made conversation.

“I didn’t know that you were married,” said Mr. Sims.

“Yes,” said Mr. Purvis, “married, and with five dear boys and three dear girls.”  The eight of them, he told us, were a great blessing.  So, too, was his wife—­a great social worker, it seemed, in the cause of women’s rights and a marvellous platform speaker in the temperance crusade.

“By the way, Mr. Sims,” said Mr. Purvis (they had called one another “Mr.” after the first five minutes), “you may remember my wife.  I think perhaps you knew her in our college days.  She was a Miss Dashaway.”

Mr. Sims bowed his head over his plate, as another of his lost illusions vanished into thin air.

After Mr. Purvis had gone, my friend spoke out his mind—­once and once only, and more in regret than anger.

“I’m afraid,” he said, “that old Ned has turned into a sissy.”

It was only to be expected that the visits of later friends—­the “boys” who happened to “blow in”—­were disappointments.  Art Hamilton, who came next, and who had been one of the most brilliant men of the Class of ’86 had turned somehow into a “complete mutt.”  Jake Todd, who used to write so brilliantly in the college paper, as recollected by Mr. Sims, was now the editor of a big New York daily.  Good things might have been expected of him, but it transpired that he had undergone “wizening of the brain.”  In fact, a number of Mr. Sims’s former friends had suffered from this cruel disease, consisting apparently of a shrinkage or contraction of the cerebellum.

Mr. Sims spoke little of his disappointments.  But I knew that he thought much about them.  They set him wondering.  There were changes here that to the thoughtful mind called for investigation.

So I was not surprised when he informed me that it was his intention to visit “the old place” and have a look at it.  The “old place,” called also the “old shop,” indicated, as I knew, Mr. Sims’s college, the original scene of the exploits of the old gang.  In the thirty years since he had graduated, though separated from it only by two hundred miles, Mr. Sims had never revisited it.  So is it always with the most faithful of the sons of learning.  The illumination of the inner eye is better than the crude light of reality.  College reunions are but for the noisy lip service of the shallow and the interested.  The deeper affection glows in the absent heart.

My friend invited me to “come along.”  We would, he said, “blow in” upon the place and have a look at it.

It was in the fullness of the spring time that we went, when the leaves are out on the college campus, and when Commencement draws near, and when all the college, even the students, are busy.

Mr. Sims, I noted when I joined him at the train, was dressed as for the occasion.  He wore a round straw hat with a coloured ribbon, and light grey suit, and a necktie with the garish colours of the college itself.  Thus dressed, he leaned as lightly as his foot allowed him upon a yellow stick, and dreamed himself again an undergraduate.