If Gerald Eversley cared at all for being a ‘swell,’ it was only because his admission to ‘swelldom’ destroyed the last remaining barrier between himself and his friend. There was now no scene of life at St. Anselm’s to which he could not accompany Harry Venniker. They could talk more freely; they had more interests in common. They were more frequently seen together. Some one in the school began to call them ‘the inseparables.’ Never had their friendship seemed so intimate or complete as in their last days at St. Anselm’s. And yet what a gulf, that no man thought of, stretched between them! Almost all boys whose lives in their public schools have been honourable, experience a sadness--a sinking of the heart--as they draw near to the time of leaving them for ever. They know the trials and dangers as well as the delights of school life; they do not know what may come after it. They have been sailing in waters where every reef and shoal is mapped out for them, and they are going to put forth on the untravelled illimitable ocean. The counsel which they valued, even when it was rejected, will be theirs no more. There will be no familiar hand, as of old, to bear them up, no voice to guide them aright. It is the mysteriousness of the future that appals them. If only they could foresee the worst, it would be less dreadful. Besides this, Harry Venniker and Gerald Eversley stood at the parting of the roads. They would be friends perhaps, but at a distance. The old daily intercourse of the last four years was dying, and it could not be revived or replaced. It was to this cause, and only to this, that Harry Venniker attributed the depression of spirits which he thought he noticed in his schoolfellow. ‘Cheer up, old man,’ he said one day. ‘You must not mope. I’ll write to you every week, and so must you to me; and you’ll come to Helmsbury in the holidays; it will be almost as good as being at St. Anselm’s.’ Light-hearted promises! Ah! how many a one has fondly deemed that the future would be as the present, and it never, never is the same! But life is saved from the paralysis which reflection would cause by the blessed necessity of action. If there were more time for reflection, it would become impossible to act. But because the habitual daily duties of life demand action, we can live, and not live in vain. Thus it is that the saintliest Christians, like Bishop Wilson, who entered most deeply into the joy of communion with the All Holy, have yet given the preference to an active over a contemplative life. In the stir and eagerness of the last days at St. Anselm’s Gerald Eversley had not much time for thought.