“It is rather a long story,” said George, when we had at last made ourselves comfortable, “and I have never told it before.  I don’t know why I should tell it now, but somehow I want to.  I felt this evening after I left the Capitol that I would, and I asked leave of Mrs. Herbert while we were walking to her home together.  I knew she would let me:  I am the only friend, I suppose,—­the only real friend, I mean, whom she trusts and treats as an intimate friend,—­that she has in the world.  I know I am the only person who knows the whole story of her sad life.

“When I was in the university,” he slowly continued, holding his cigar in the gas-jet and turning it over and over between his fingers, with an evident air of collating his reminiscences, “Phil Kendall and I were great friends.  I don’t know how we ever came to be so:  it was natural, I suppose, for us to like each other.  I used to notice that he did not associate much with the other fellows; and yet he was the best runner and boxer in the class.  He was the only fellow in the university who could do the giant swing on the bar, and, though he had never taken lessons, it was next to impossible for any one but Wayland, the sub-professor in chemistry, to touch him with the foils.  Somehow we were drawn together, and before long were hardly ever apart.  We used to get out our Horace together, he with the pony and text and I with the lexicon, for he was too impatient to hunt up the words.  I believe you study differently now.”

“We still have the pony,” said Perry.

“And we used to puzzle our heads together over Mechanics, for we didn’t have election as you do, and take long walks, and play chess, and get up spreads in our room for nobody but us two.  Not such elaborate affairs as are called spreads now, but I warrant you they were fully as much enjoyed.  I fancy we were rather sentimental.  We used to hold imaginary conversations in the person of some favorite characters in fiction; but we were very young and boyish.”

Perry glanced at me sheepishly, but George went on without noticing: 

“Phil’s father lived here, and was proprietor of the only wholesale grocery-store the town then boasted of.  He had been captain of a volunteer company in the war, and, I fancy, had a romance too.  At any rate, his wife had been dead since Phil was a little fellow in knickerbockers; and not very long after her death a certain Mrs. Preston had sent a little girl, about a year older than Phil, with a dying charge to the captain to care for the friendless orphan for the sake of their early love.  No one but Grace could ever get anything out of the old gentleman about her mother, and she never learned much.  Mrs. Preston had been unhappy at least, and perhaps miserable, in her marriage.  We always thought she had forsaken Mr. Kendall in their youth and made a hasty marriage; but never a word was uttered by him about Grace’s father.