We will stick to De Quincey's definition, and for heaven's sake, my dear fellow, do get Lynwood out of that awful plight! No wonder you were depressed when you lived all this age with such a sentence unfinished!" "For the matter of that," said Derrick, "he can't get out till the end of the book; but I can begin to go on with him now." "And when you leave Oxford ?" "Then I mean to settle down in London--to write leisurely--and possibly to read for the Bar." "We might be together," I suggested.

And Derrick took to this idea, being a man who detested solitude and crowds about equally.

Since his mother's death he had been very much alone in the world.

To Lawrence he was always loyal, but the two had nothing in common, and though fond of his sister he could not get on at all with the manufacturer, his brother-in-law.

But this prospect of life together in London pleased him amazingly; he began to recover his spirits to a great extent and to look much more like himself.
It must have been just as he had taken his degree that he received a telegram to announce that Major Vaughan had been invalided home, and would arrive at Southampton in three weeks' time.