Edgar shrugged his shoulders. “You will do me a better service if you will tell me how to get out of here,” he said. “I was a fool to stay. To tell the truth, I had not woke up to any particular interest in what became of me. I had only myself to think of; but I can’t bear to remember them all, and have nothing to do with them--that’s the truth.” “You must make up your mind to that, old fellow,” said Harry, the philosopher; “few people get just all they want. But you can’t go and run away for that. You shouldn’t have run away at the first. It’s the coming back that does it. _I_ know. You thought it was all over and done with, and that you could begin straight off, without coming across old things and old faces. I’ve turned over about as many new leaves, and made about as many fresh starts as most people, and I can feel for you. It ain’t no manner of use; you can’t get done with one set of people and take up with another; the old ones are always cropping up again,” said Harry, oracularly. “You’ve got to make up your mind to it. But I must say,” he added, changing his tone, “that of all places in the world for getting shut of the past, to come here!” “I was a fool,” said Edgar, with his head between his hands. Up to this moment he had thought of Harry Thornleigh as a somewhat stupid boy. Now the young man of the world had the better of him. For the first time he fully realised that he had been foolish in coming here, and had placed himself in an exceptionally difficult position by his own act, and not by the action of powers beyond his control, as he thought. In short, he had allowed himself to be passive, to drift where the current led him, to do what was suggested, to follow any one that took it upon him to lead. I suppose it is consistent with the curious vagaries of human nature that this sudden sense of his impotence to direct his fate should come just after the warm flush of self-assertion and self-confidence which had made him feel his own fate to be once more worth thinking of. Harry, elevated on his calm height of matter-of-fact philosophy, had never in his life experienced so delightful a sense of capacity to lecture another, and he did not lose the opportunity.