He left at the end of the term and I did not see him again until we were both young men. Then one day I ran against him in Oxford Street, and he asked me to come and spend a few days with his people in Surrey. I found him wan-looking and depressed, and every now and then he sighed. During a walk across the common he cheered up considerably, but the moment we got back to the house door he seemed to recollect himself, and began to sigh again. He ate no dinner whatever, merely sipping a glass of wine and crumbling a piece of bread. I was troubled at noticing this, but his relatives--a maiden aunt, who kept house, two elder sisters, and a weak-eyed female cousin who had left her husband behind her in India--were evidently charmed. They glanced at each other, and nodded and smiled. Once in a fit of abstraction he swallowed a bit of crust, and immediately they all looked pained and surprised. In the drawing-room, under cover of a sentimental song, sung by the female cousin, I questioned his aunt on the subject. "What's the matter with him?" I said. "Is he ill?" The old lady chuckled. "You'll be like that one day," she whispered gleefully. "When," I asked, not unnaturally alarmed. "When you're in love," she answered. "Is _he_ in love?" I inquired after a pause. "Can't you see he is?" she replied somewhat scornfully. I was a young man, and interested in the question. "Won't he ever eat any dinner till he's got over it?" I asked. She looked round sharply at me, but apparently decided that I was only foolish. "You wait till your time comes," she answered, shaking her curls at me. "You won't care much about your dinner--not if you are _really_ in love." In the night, about half-past eleven, I heard, as I thought, footsteps in the passage, and creeping to the door and opening it I saw the figure of my friend in dressing-gown and slippers, vanishing down the stairs. My idea was that, his brain weakened by trouble, he had developed sleep-walking tendencies. Partly out of curiosity, partly to watch over him, I slipped on a pair of trousers and followed him. He placed his candle on the kitchen table and made a bee-line for the pantry door, from where he subsequently emerged with two pounds of cold beef on a plate and about a quart of beer in a jug; and I came away, leaving him fumbling for pickles.