‘What are you going to be, Harold, when you grow up,’ he asked――‘when you leave school and college, I mean?’ Brocklehurst looked somewhat surprised. ‘Be!’ he echoed. ‘Oh, I can’t tell you that. I haven’t even thought about it yet.... Besides I don’t want to be anything in particular. I shall be myself, I suppose――just what I have always been.’ ‘But I mean what shall you do?’ Graham persisted. ‘You’ll do _something_, of course. What do you think about when you are all alone?’ Brocklehurst smiled. ‘Very often of you,’ he said lightly. ‘Oh, I dare say I shall manage to drift along somehow or other. That is what I do now, you know.’ ‘Drift?’ ‘Yes. Don’t you think it rather charming?’ He spoke in the half-lazy, half-ironic fashion Graham had now grown accustomed to, but which he had noticed to have a curiously irritating effect upon other people. It was indeed just one of the innocent causes of Brocklehurst’s unpopularity that he had thought of alluding to, especially since it, more than anything else, tended to make his masters dislike him. ‘I haven’t any very strong hold upon things,’ Brocklehurst amplified. ‘Everything seems nice enough until I actually do it; but immediately afterwards it begins to bore me a little. As soon as you’ve tried a thing, you know, it’s apt to become the least bit tiresome. That is why I shouldn’t care to tie myself down to anything in particular.’ ‘But you must, for all that, follow some definite way of life,’ Graham answered, dissatisfied. ‘My dear fellow, I only want to follow you.’ ‘Me?’ ‘Yes, you. I’m not joking at all. Since I’ve known you a great deal has changed. You’ve made me see things in a different way. It’s perhaps rather extraordinary, but it’s true. You’re so――what shall I call it?――good.’ ‘But you don’t see them in _my_ way,’ Graham objected. ‘I know――I know. I dare say not even in a way you’d care for. But still there is a great difference from the old way. Only I can’t exactly tell you what it is, nor how long it will last. Probably just as long as our friendship. That is why I want to keep close to you. I’ve been friends with other boys than you, you see,――even with some of those who try now to make you drop me. Look at those two rows of trees, Graham, running side by side for a little, and then suddenly branching off in opposite directions.’ ‘Well?’ ‘Well: they are like our destinies.’ Graham glanced at him. ‘Why do you say that?’ he asked a little strangely. Brocklehurst smiled. ‘That is, if our friendship is ever to be broken,’ he explained. ‘A real friendship can never be broken,’ answered Graham slowly. ‘If you think that ours can, then it is not a very great one――even now.’ Brocklehurst nodded his head. ‘I wonder what you call a real friendship!’ ‘Oh, if you have to ask――――!’ ‘It is only because I want you to tell me,’ he said softly.