On the other hand, these morbid imaginings (as I was far from unwilling to consider them) had one and all deserted me in the sane, clean company of the capital young fellow in the next room.
I have confessed my condition up to the time of this queer meeting.
I have tried to bring young Rattray before you with some hint of his freshness and his boyish charm; and though the sense of failure is heavy upon me there, I who knew the man knew also that I must fail to do him justice.

Enough may have been said, however, to impart some faint idea of what this youth was to me in the bitter and embittering anti-climax of my life.

Conventional figures spring to my pen, but every one of them is true; he was flowers in spring, he was sunshine after rain, he was rain following long months of drought.

I slept admirably after all; and I awoke to see the overturned toilet-table, and to thrill as I remembered there was one fellow-creature with whom I could fraternize without fear of a rude reopening of my every wound.
I hurried my dressing in the hope of our breakfasting together.

I knocked at the next door, and, receiving no answer, even ventured to enter, with the same idea.