However, I won't deal in generalities, with an old friend like you! For we are old friends, somehow. Do you know, I think we began as old friends?" she said with a playfulness of tone that ill accorded with the tears that glistened in her eyes.
"Thank you very much for saying so," I replied. "I like to think of you as an old friend," ("though you don't look it!" would have been the almost necessary sequence, with any other lady; but she and I seemed to have long passed out of the time when compliments, or any such trivialities, were possible.)
Here the train paused at a station, where two or three passengers entered the carriage; so no more was said till we had reached our journey's end.
On our arrival at Elveston, she readily adopted my suggestion that we should walk up together; so, as soon as our luggage had been duly taken charge ofhers by the servant who met her at the station, and mine by one of the porterswe set out together along the familiar lanes, now linked in my memory with so many delightful associations. Lady
