save poor Tom Castleton, over whom, in an alien grave, the years of the Lord passed unheeded.  Poor old chap!  He was the son of the acting-manager of a well-known theatre and used to talk to us of the starry theatre-folk, his family intimates, as though they were haphazard occupants of an omnibus.  How we envied him!  And he was forever writing plays which he read to us; which plays, I remember, were always on the verge of being produced by Irving.  We believed in him firmly.  He alone of the little crew had a touch of genius.

Blond, bull-necked Jaffery who rowed in the college boat, and would certainly have got his blue if he had been amenable to discipline and, because he was not, got sent down ingloriously from the University at the beginning of his third year, certainly did not show a sign of it.  Adrian was a bit unaccountable.  He wrote poems for the Cambridge Review, and became Vice-President of the Union; but he ran disastrously to fancy waistcoats, and shuddered at Dickens because his style was not that of Walter Pater.  For myself, Hilary Freeth—­well—­I am a happy nonentity.  I have a very mild scholarly taste which sufficient private means, accruing to me through my late father’s acumen in buying a few founder’s shares in a now colossal universal providing emporium, enable me to gratify.  I am a harmless person of no account.  But the other three mattered.  They were definite—­Jaffery, blatantly definite; Adrian Boldero, in his queer, silky way, incisively definite; Tom Castleton, romantically definite.  And poor old Tom was dead.  Dear, impossible, feckless fellow.  He took a first class in the Classical Tripos and we thought his brilliant career was assured—­but somehow circumstances baffled him; he had a terrible time for a dozen years or so, taking pupils, acting, free-lancing in journalism, his father having, in the meanwhile, died suddenly penniless; and then Fortune smiled on him.  He secured a professorship at an Australian University.  The three of us—­Jaffery and Adrian and I—­saw him off at Southampton.  He never reached Australia.  He died on the voyage.  Poor old Tom!

So I sat, with the review of Adrian’s book before me, looking out at my Pleasant garden, and my mind went irresistibly back to the old days and then wandered on to the present.  Tom was dead:  I flourished, a comfortable cumberer of the earth; Jaffery was doing something idiotically desperate somewhere or the other—­he was a war-correspondent by trade (as regular an employment as that of the maker of hot-cross buns), and a desperado by predilection—­I had not heard from him for a year; and now Adrian—­if indeed the Adrian Boldero of the review was he—­had written an epoch-making novel.