But all the rheumatic pain was by no means over, and walking made him feel it; he was dreadfully weak, and was so giddy and faint after the first few steps, that they could not bring him to shake hands with Alfred as both had wished, but had to lay him down as fast as they could.  So tired was he, that he could hardly say anything all the time he was there; and Alfred had to keep silence for fear of wearying him still more.  There was a sort of shyness, too, which hindered the two from even letting their eyes meet, often as they had heard each other’s voices, and had greeted one another through the thin partition.  As Paul lay with his eyes shut, Alfred raised himself to take a good survey of the sharp pinched features, the hollow cheeks, deep-sunk pits for the eyes,—­and yellow ghastly skin of the worn face, and the figure, so small and wasted that it was like nothing, curled up in all those wraps.  One who could read faces better than young Alfred could, would have gathered not only that the boy who lay there had gone through a great deal, but that there was much mind and thought crushed down by misery, and a gentle nature not fit to stand up alone against it, and so sinking down without exertion.

And when Alfred was learning a verse of his favourite hymn —

‘There is a rill whose waters rise—­’

Paul’s eye-lids rose, and looked him all over dreamily, comparing him perhaps with the notions he had carried away from his two former glimpses.  Alfred did not look now so utterly different from anything he had seen before, since Mrs. King and Ellen had been hovering round his bed for nearly a month past; but still the fair skin, pink colour, dark eye-lashes, glossy hair, and white hands, were like a dream to him, as if they belonged to the pure land whither Alfred was going, and he was quite loath to hear him speak like another boy, as he knew he could do, having often listened to his talk through the wall.  At the least sign of Alfred’s looking up, he turned away his eyes as if he had been doing something by stealth.

He came in continually after this; and little things each day, and Harold’s talk, made the two acquainted and like boys together; but it was not till Christmas Day that they felt like knowing each other.

It was the first time Paul felt himself able to be of any use, for he was to be left in charge of Alfred, while Mrs. King and both her other children went to church.  Paul was sadly crippled still, and every frost filled his bones with acute pain, and bent him like an old man, so that he was still a long way from getting down-stairs, but he could make a shift to get about the room, and he looked greatly pleased when Alfred declared that he should want nobody else to stay with him in the morning.

Very glad he was that his mother would not be kept from Ellen’s first Holy Communion.  Owing to the Curate not being a priest, the Feast had not been celebrated since Michaelmas; but a clergyman had come to help Mr. Cope, that the parish might not be deprived of the Festival on such a day as Christmas.