"That may be," Cosden admitted, "but how about you? I have an idea that, with the peculiar state of mind you've been in lately, you will forget your overpowering sense of age better with me than you will with him."
"Perhaps," Huntington admitted, smiling; "but I must think of him first."
"You don't mind my butting in on you both once in a while?"
"On the contrary; but I know how little you have in common with Hamlen. I'm afraid he may bore you."
"You forget my reincarnation," Cosden said dryly. "Who knows but that I was a professor of classical antiquities in my previous existence? If he bores me I'll cut out; but I've an idea that he can teach me a thing or two, and just now I'm keen on becoming educated."
There was a marked restraint in Hamlen's manner when Huntington met him at the station and motored him to the Beacon Street house. His embarrassment and the all too obvious efforts he made to impress upon his friend the occasion of his leaving Bermuda would have convinced Huntington, if he had not already known, that the real reason was that which he had already anticipated in his prediction to Mrs. Thatcher. Yet no one but Hamlen knew the agony of loneliness he had experienced when, after watching the steamer disappear, he returned to his empty villa. No one but Hamlen knew of the struggle he had passed through in his efforts to readjust his life, or of the terror which came to him with the final realization that he could no longer find solace in the work which he had previously forced to absorb his waking hours.
It was this terror Huntington saw in his classmate's eyes which told him all that any one would ever know of the real tragedy. Hamlen looked years older,—his face was more sallow, his hair more grey. Huntington looked at him in pity, and felt apprehensive lest the task he had allotted to himself had been too long postponed. Then the thought came back to him, "He considers himself a failure and me a success!"
The welcome was such as to reassure Hamlen as much as anything could. Huntington made him feel as much at home as was possible for one whose mental poise was so sadly disordered. No special effort was made at conversation; everything was treated as a matter of course. Little by little Hamlen found himself, and as he spoke more freely Huntington entered into his spirit, but followed rather than led.
"It is a relief to get into this quieter atmosphere after New York," Hamlen remarked after they had sat in silence for some moments at the table after dinner. "I felt as if I had been suddenly put down in a whirling maelstrom, and there wasn't a minute when I did not expect to be annihilated the next!"
Huntington laughed quietly. "A New-Yorker would consider that the most subtle compliment you could pay his city. It is not enough to have the stranger merely impressed; he must be appalled!"