"Heavens!" said Gerald, "who's that? You don't mean to say that's Harrison! Why, I remember him when he first came, a ridiculous kid; we used to call him 'Little Belly.' About the first week he was there he showed his gym. belt to someone and said: 'Isn't it small? Haven't I a little belly?'"
"And here's Hardy," said Roland. "Do you remember that innings of his in the final house match, and how we lined up on each side of the pavilion and cheered him when he came out?"
"And do you remember that try of his in the three cock?—two men and the back to beat and only a couple of yards to spare between them and the touch-line. I don't know how he kept his foot inside."
And as the store of Fernhurst photographs became exhausted they found among the notes and hotel bills delightful memories of much that they had in common.
"The Café du Nord, Ghent! My son," said Gerald, "do you remember that top-hole Burgundy? Yes, here it is—two bottles of Volnay, fifty-three francs."
"Wasn't that the night when that ripping little German girl smiled at us across the room?"
"And when I said that another bottle of Volnay was better than any woman in the world."
A torn hotel bill at Cologne recalled a disappointing evening in the company of two German girls whom they had met at a dance and taken out to supper—an evening that had ended, to the surprise of both of them, in a platonic pressure of the hands.
"Do you remember how we stood under the cathedral and watched them pass out of sight behind the turning of the Hohe Strasse, and then you turned to me and said: 'There's no understanding women'?"
And then there was the evening when they had gone to the opera in Bonn and had had supper afterwards in a little restaurant, from the window of which they could see the Rhine flowing beneath them in the moonlight, and its beauty and the tender sentimental melodies of Verdi had produced in both of them a mood of rare appreciation; they had sat in silence and made no attempt to express in talk the sense of wonderment. Much was recalled to them by these pieces of crumpled paper, and when Roland put away the drawer it seemed to Gerald that he was locking away a whole period of his life. And when they said good-night to each other on the stairs Gerald could not help wondering whether, in the evening that had just passed, their friendship had not reached the limit of its tether. Roland was beginning a new life in which he would have no part. As he heard his friend's door shut behind him he could not help feeling that never again would they reach that same point of intimacy.