When on the day following that sad August one he about the middle of the forenoon had driven distractedly into Professor Ousley's yard, he saw that friend of his youth, the man he loved best of men, the most nearly perfect character he knew among men,--he saw him sitting on a rustic bench under an old forest tree inside his front gate,--waiting for him. Beside him on the bench lay papers over which he was working--not because he enjoyed work at that moment probably, but because it was impossible to sit there and wait with empty hands--with his mind tortured by one thought, the sorrow and shame of this meeting. As the doctor somehow got out of his buggy and started across the grass toward him, he did not look up because he could not look up at once; and he did not rise and come to meet him; it was impossible--for a moment. But then with a high bracing of himself--he came. And coming, he showed in his face only deep emotion, anxiety, distress, such as a true man might feel for another true man who had been caught in one of life's disasters. As a friend might walk toward a friend who from perfect health had by some accident of machinery tottered to him mangled; or as to a friend of wealth who through some false investment had by a turn of fortune's wheel been left penniless; or as to a friend of sound eyesight who had suddenly lost the power of right vision; or as to a friend who travelling a straight road across a perilous country had by some atrophy or lesion of the brain lost his bearings and was found wandering over a precipice. "How do you do, Downs?" he called out, using the old first name which for years now he had dropped, the boyish name of complete boyish friendship. "Come and sit down," he said, and he wound his arm through the doctor's and all but supported him until they reached the seat under the tree. And then, without waiting or wavering or looking at his friend's face, most of all without allowing him to utter a word (like a man aroused to the battle of a whole life which concentrated itself then and there), he turned to his papers and began to speak of the future--of the professorship with its new work, new duties, new services--to the going away from Kentucky: not once did he turn the talk away from the new, the future, except that when he finished he covered the whole theme by saying that the old ties must hold fast and become the dearer for the separation. He wanted the doctor's advice, insisted upon having it, forced him too on into this future. Not a word, not a look of the eye, not a note in the voice, about a thing so near, too near. "Now this is the end of that," he said, putting the papers away. "But it all brings up something else: the farther we go forward, the longer we look backward; and the future, this new future, has turned my eyes all the more toward the past, Downs, our past--yours and mine!"