“And mine.
“But how you have altered, Kenneth! How you must have suffered to make you look so old!”
“You forget I am old, twenty-one next birthday; and you are only a year less. But what wind blew you here? I thought, Archie, you had settled down as an engineer on shore.”
“Your letters roused a roving spirit in me, Kenneth. I determined to see the world. I took the first appointment I could get. On a Frenchman. I haven’t had much luck. We have been wrecked at Domingo, and I came here last night in a boat. But come, tell us your own adventures. I have all your letters by heart, but I must hear more; I must hear everything from your own mouth, my dear brown old man.”
Kenneth was brown; there was no mistake about that, very brown, and very tall and manly-looking, and the moustache he wore set off his beauty very much. No, he had not cultivated his moustache. It had cultivated itself.
“Come down to the hotel,” said Archie. “I am not poor. We saved everything. It was a most unromantic shipwreck.”
“No,” replied Kenneth, “not to the hotel to-night. Come up the mountain with me to my cottage.”
“Up the mountain?”
“Yes, my lad,” said Kenneth, smiling. “Up the mountain. Haven’t forgotten how to climb a hill, have you, I say, Archie, boy? for, as brown as I look, I am an invalid.”
“What!” cried Archie, in some alarm. “Nothing serious, I sincerely hope.”