Yet one more point of his life must not be omitted. In front of the old church at St. Anselm’s is a terrace commanding a wide, impressive view of the wold. To this he would resort in the evening when the sunset tinged the horizon and the hills and woods beneath with an exquisite wealth of colouring. Under its elms he would stand, thinking and thinking. Somehow, whether from association with the graves or from the setting of the sun, the view, beautiful as it was, impressed him with a feeling of sadness; or perhaps it was that few views so extensive are so free from the traces of human habitation. Anyhow it harmonised with his own solitary temper. Thus it was by a strange coincidence, that, as at home, so at school, a churchyard became an element of his life. He was fond of it because he was naturally serious, and it made him more serious still. But nobody knew how often he went thither. So divergent in all outward appearance were the lives of the two boys, living together at the same time, in the same school; yet between them a strong mutual attachment was springing up. They were still occupants of the same room. They might have changed; sometimes they thought, or at least Harry did, of changing; but they remained together, though they might have had rooms to themselves. The motives of this singular intimacy were not the same. On Harry Venniker’s side it was in the main a generous sense of protective obligation. Since the night when, in an impulse of sympathetic emotion, he had promised to be Gerald’s friend for ever, he had somehow felt that it would be a dereliction of duty to leave this strange unsophisticated boy to shift for himself. Harry believed that he could help him, and that nobody else could or would, and that, if he were left alone, he would be sure to be bullied. Helplessness is itself a title to the service of generous souls. The mean, cruel soul may impose upon it, but the noble soul reverences it, and nobility of thought and action was native to Harry Venniker. It ought to be said, too, that he was in some sense an admirer of Gerald’s intellectual ability. Being no student himself, he could not help respecting a life devoted to study. And, in proportion as learning assumed for him the general aspect of a difficult and irksome duty, he looked with a reverential surprise upon one who loved it as a mistress.