The bright young face, the fresh, gay voice, all gone!
'I am not quick at making friendships,' thought Maurice. 'I feel as if his death had left me alone in the world.'
His life had been unusually lonely, save for this one strong friendship. He had lost his father in childhood, and his mother a few years later. Happily Captain Clissold, although a younger son, had inherited a small estate in Devonshire, from his mother. This gave his orphan son four hundred a year—an income which permitted his education at Eton and Oxford, and which made him thoroughly independent as a young man, to whom the idea of matrimony and its obligations seemed far off.
His uncle, Sir Henry Clissold, was a gentleman of some standing in the political world, a county member, a man who was chairman of innumerable committees, and never had a leisure moment. This gentleman's ideas of the fitness of things were outraged by his nephew's refusal to adopt any profession.
'I could have pushed you forward in almost any career you had chosen,' he said, indignantly. 'I have friends I can command in all the professions; or if you had cared to go to India, you might have been a judge in the Sudder before you were five-and-thirty.'
'Thanks, my dear uncle, I shouldn't care about being broiled alive, or having to learn from twenty to thirty dialects before I could understand plaintiff or defendant,' Maurice replied, coolly. 'Give me my crust of bread and liberty.'
'Fortunate for you that you have your crust of bread,' growled Sir Henry, 'but at the rate you are going you will never provide yourself with a slice of cheese.'
To-night, perhaps for the first time, Maurice Clissold felt that life was a mistake. His friend and comrade had been more necessary to him than he could have believed, for he had never quite accepted James as his equal in intellect. He had had his own world of thought, which the careless lad never entered. But now that the boy was gone he felt that shadowy world darkened by his loss.
'Would to Heaven I could stand face to face with his murderer!' he said to himself; 'one of us two should go down, never to rise again!'