Let thy soul strive that still the same
Be early friendship's sacred flame;
The affinities have strongest part
In youth, and draw men heart to heart:
As life wears on and finds no rest,
The individual in each breast
Is tyrannous to sunder them.

CONTENTS

YOUNG LIVES

CHAPTER I

HARD YOUNG HEARTS

Behind the Venetian blinds of a respectable middle-class, fifty-pound-a-year, "semi-detached," "family" house, in a respectable middle-class road of the little north-county town of Sidon, midway between the trees of wealth upon the hill, and the business quarters that ended in squalor on the bank of the broad and busy river,--a house boasting a few shabby trees of its own, in its damp little rockeried slips of front and back gardens,--on a May evening some ten or twelve years ago, a momentous crisis of contrasts had been reached.