A very little encouragement was enough to set us building castles in the air.

And we did build castles in the air that morning as we paced the crowded city streets.
By the time these architectural exercises were over it was time for me to go back to the station and catch my train; but not before I had tried to extract from Jack what he had been doing with himself since he was expelled from Stonebridge House.
As before, he was very uncommunicative.

All I heard was that the reason he didn't get my letters at Packworth was that he had told me, or thought he had told me, to address my letters to "T," and I had always addressed them to "J." But even had I addressed them correctly, he would only have received the first, as a fortnight after he left Stonebridge he went to London, where he had hitherto been working as a grocer's shop-boy.

You should have seen the look of disgust with which he referred to this part of his life! But now, having seen Merrett, Barnacle, and Company's advertisement, he was applying for their situation.
But in all his story he would tell me nothing about his home, or his relatives, so that as to knowing who my friend Smith was, or where he came from, I went back that afternoon to Brownstroke as much in the dark as ever.

But I had found _him_!.